Essays

Fire is as much a tool and a representation of rebirth as it is a force of destruction. Water can represent the same, but also a freedom and a fear of the unknown. After all, who really knows what lurks under dark waters? Nothing in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem sequence “Waterlily Fire,” composed over the span of four years beginning in 1958 and published in 1962, exists in singularity, and the complex relationship she creates between fire and water is testament to that. Rukeyser presents her audience with a piece that opposes male artificiality with female nature, addressing the issue of women’s enforced isolation and fractured identities, the conquering of this oppression, and the breaking of natural and imposed barriers throughout the poem.

In “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser describes a fire that was at once more than reality and more than metaphor. Rukeyser bore witness to the aftermath of the fire that ravaged the Museum of Modern Art and one of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies paintings (1914-1926). She was meeting with her friend Richard Griffith, curator of the museum’s film library, whom she calls “Dick” in the sequence’s opening section, “The Burning” (CP 406). Beyond this actual event and biographical fact, Rukeyser describes a metamorphosis. The sequence begins with a description of the fire and of a city that the fire is at once destroying and transforming. Change, after all, often comes with a destruction of what preceded it. Rukeyser homes in on the idea of losing youth and being visited by an awakening, which appears to be a sexual one. Water lilies, a symbol of purity, burnt the day Rukeyser witnessed their remnants, and her poems also burned with youth, naivety, and innocence.

The sequence ends with the line, “I speak to you / You speak to me,” which implies a sort of dialogue intended to be created by the poems (410). This dialogue, created by a woman, aligns with Rukeyser’s idea of muses. In “Many Keys,” a “lost” feminist essay she composed in 1957, which has recently been recovered, edited, and published with an introduction by Eric Keenaghan, Rukeyser characterizes women as muses for men rather than being their own muses. The woman “is a listener who answers, traditionally, as Muse, evoker; who answers, sometimes, as artist, and breaks that barrier” but who when writing poetry “does not turn to a muse” (Rukeyser, “Many Keys” 195). Rukeyser breaks tradition and convention by initiating instead of responding, and she suggests that women, through their being their own muses, gain autonomy and the power to put forth their own narratives. When they are simply the muses of men, their very being is oppressed and the truth of who they are is hidden. Rukeyser’s work gives the audience her own truth, a truth riddled with independence, revolution, and desire. In “Waterlily Fire”—more specifically, in the first two sections of the poem— Rukeyser discusses women as their own oppressors and liberators. She expresses this duality through their presence as both fire and water, their isolation as an island but also their ability to build bridges, and their existence as both pure water lilies as well as humans who experience desire and are objects to desire. These are natural, elemental barriers that women can find as much strength in as they can find weakness. The imposed barriers come in the form of guards, which draw out fear instead of strength.

Because this message is based on layers of duality, it seems that the existence of natural barriers implies that all other barriers can only exist in the sense of being unnatural and must be abolished instead of amended. These unnatural, external barriers exist and are addressed in “Many Keys” because the essay expresses the necessity that women have their own voices. Women must integrate themselves into their writings not only because it is what they know but also because they need to take back narratives that have been controlled by external factors for much too long. By creating their own narratives, they remove themselves from false narratives and create the bridges that are described in “Waterlily Fire.” In the second poem of the sequence, “The Island,” Rukeyser evolves from “I was the island with no bridges” to “I am a city with bridges and tunnels” (406). Rukeyser makes the fracturing of women’s identities apparent by showing how they are fractured within themselves as well as by outside forces that inflict limitations and rules upon them. But through this device, Rukeyser also makes clear that the mending of their identities through the formation of connections with others is a natural thing.

These connections do not imply one shared identity, though. Women may fight together against a shared oppression, but every woman has the individual struggle of accepting and becoming herself. In one stanza, Rukeyser moves from the idea of the acceptance of oneself to a description of “blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red” (407). Before the poem ends, this image transforms into “Lilies of all my life on fire” (408). Becoming whole means realizing one’s humanity, and humans have desires. If we are to have a discussion of the societal fracturing of women’s identities, it would be an injustice to ignore the over-sexualization of women and the stigmatization of overtly sexual women. The poem mends this fracture by presenting the purity and the sexuality of women as natural, both essential to who a woman is. Once this fact is accepted, as Rukeyser writes, “I walk past the guards into my city of change” (408). Rukeyser walks past imposed internal barriers and external oppressors at once, becoming a woman who is capable of owning her own identity and building bridges.

These guards featured in the last line of “The Island” are the physical manifestations of the unnatural entities in the first two poems. In the sequence’s opening poem, “The Burning,” Rukeyser writes, “I pass guards, finding the center of my fear” (406). The guards, as mentioned above, are then present in the line that ends the second section, “I walk past the guards into my city of change” (408). They stand out in the poem, breaking away from natural things (i.e., fire, water, earth, human desire) and presenting the audience with what is presumably only a few men. These men only pose a threat if the people walking by them fear them. This fear is not a natural, automatic fear, but instead one that is taught. Guards police what a person does, ensuring that consequences are enforced for stepping outside of boundaries. This strictness, this fear, is something that is created and something that is oppressive, and Rukeyser shows a woman breaking the expected pattern of complacency, instead fighting to reinstate the natural as ruling. Another thing to note is how Rukeyser’s presentation of the imposed barrier implies that the guards are men, even though their gender has not been explicitly stated.

If the male imposition of control and barriers is unnatural, then the womanly show of power is elemental. Men, the guards, can create a limited amount of fear when they are given a woman’s permission to do so, but what can a woman create? What can she destroy? The second line of “The Burning” begins, “I go to the stone street turning to fire” (405). In the first line of “The Island,” the narrator claims she was “Born of this river and this rock island” (406). This contrast of fire and water shows the natural strength of women, and it also shows women as contradictory forces of nature who can oppress themselves. Both quotes mention an origin of a stone or rock, thus showing something stable that the strength is rooted in; but one passage shows a beginning of water and the latter shows a turning point of fire. Rock can withstand both fire and water, so women’s core is protected, but their two natures are at constant odds with each other. Fire and water are opposites. A woman’s identity is fractured because she will always be at risk of putting out her own fire. However, there is also a strength that can be found in the ability to nurture opposing forces within oneself. The guards had their own perceived strength, but this woman has the potential for both destruction and liberation. Beyond herself, her water and her fire can be used not only to oppose other women but also to create a collective identity: Fire may put out water, but the fires of two women combined is much stronger than the fire of one alone. It also seems curious that Rukeyser allows women to reclaim fire, as it has been known in history as an oppressive force that afflicts women, be it the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. The presentation of a fractured woman also opens the avenue to a stronger collective identity.

Stephanie Coontz shows another side of the importance of solidarity between women in “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique,” a chapter of her book A Strange Stirring. She shows Betty Friedan, a woman quite often credited with spurring second wave feminism with her classic book The Feminist Mystique (1963), as a woman who strategically isolated herself from other women, thus fracturing her own beliefs in order to focus purely on the white middle class. This was apparent through her distancing herself from the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, acknowledging her only through a “brief reference” that “minimized the tremendous debt Friedan and her book owed” to Beauvoir (Coontz 143). This was because Simone de Beauvoir’s political beliefs and her belief in intersectional equality did not align with the objectives of Friedan’s intended audience. Instead of building bridges, Friedan found it necessary to burn them. This example truly emblematizes Rukeyser’s ideas of the isolation and fractured identities that affected women because it shows that Friedan distanced herself from what the audience she was appealing to would find undesirable, hence the isolation. It also shows her breaking away from part of what she based her entire feminist theory on, thus showing a fracturing within herself as well as between other women.

Friedan created a collective identity, but an exclusive one. She had the privilege to be truly selective when building her bridges, as she existed within the realm of majority as a middle-class white woman, and thus brought to life Rukeyser’s idea of a woman as an island. Though this brings to light the isolation Rukeyser spoke of in her poem, it also brings into question the inclusivity of Rukeyser’s metaphors: Who exactly had the power in “Waterlily Fire”? Friedan built bridges, but selectively and strategically, as both a show of strength and weakness. Her strength is found through exclusion and the bridges she did create are as limiting as they are liberating.

Beyond the necessity of the fracturing, Coontz’s observation about Friedan shows how women are pitted against each other. If this state coincides with the need of patriarchal societies, does it mean that this fracturing is unnatural and imposed? Socially imposed identity-based boundaries are meant to create a collective identity, yet they create an intersectionality that actually pits women against each other. Women are islands and they are not taught to build bridges, hence their isolation from each other. This exemplifies the confusion of the natural and the unnatural Rukeyser’s islands reference in her poetic sequence. Women are either islands and isolated, discovering their own strength through making connections and building bridges, or they find their strength through prescribing to what is normal, each finding strength in a man as opposed to the poem’s vision of the elemental strength a woman is able to tap into.

Fighting imposed barriers means creating a collective identity despite the isolation that is often expected of women. Rukeyser, in her essay “Many Keys,” mentions how isolation and fracturing of identities occurs when women are expected to be muses. Coontz, in “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique,” describes a purposeful and strategic fracturing and isolation because Friedan, for her book to be popular, could only show a part of who she was. In Rukeyser’s poem, the physical barriers, apart from the guards, and isolation come from how she presents women as islands. As I noted earlier, one stanza from “Waterlily Fire” suggests the liberation of making connections, but what of the oppression women were liberated from? After Rukeyser finds such liberation, one later line in the section “The Island” asserts, “Whatever can come to a city can come to this city” (“Waterlily Fire” 407). The poem goes on to compare the city to a man, going from “changing like a man changing” to “I love this man” (407). This movement raises questions about the root of the narrator’s freedom and how free she actually is. After all, is the city not her? Is it not her island? Because if her freedom stems from manliness as opposed to a liberation of women, she has not been freed at all. Her identity is not mended, her isolation from her own identity is still more than present.

Rukeyser, within both her poem and her essay, exemplifies the power of autonomy. To have the ability to embrace and express oneself is to have the ability to exist complexly, as both fire and water, as both author and muse, and to overcome the static barriers that stand in the way of improvement. Beyond that, she also emphasizes the importance of connections. By writing, women connect with their audiences and establish credibility with them. By building bridges as Rukeyser does in “Waterlily Fire,” women are not only able to overcome their own isolation but also to guard against those who are able to infringe upon their land. Having only a bridge to connect to others, after all, means you have great power over who is able to enter your island.

Even the title of the sequence “Waterlily Fire” puts emphasis on the paradoxical nature of what can be described as either the weakness or the strength found within a woman and within womanhood. Though describing a literal fire, the title also leads to a presentation of water and fire, two things that naturally oppose each other but in combination represent women in the poem. If a woman is both water and fire, then she has not only the capability to be her own oppressor but also the capability to be both the oppressor and the liberator of other women. This is simply because, within herself, she would only have two opposite forces that work against each other. In conjunction with another woman, fire or water can be made twice as powerful.

All of this combines to create the shared but fractured identity of a woman. She is taught to be the victim but forced to be her own liberator. She is fire, water, island, bridges, isolated, connected. The elemental is not just natural but also tied to human nature. Rukeyser presents women as sexual beings, as beings who crave and find intimacy and connections. They are fire, destructive and full of desire, and water, salvific and fluid. They are complex beings with a depth that is hidden behind external impositions and identities that fracture under the pressure of societal expectations. When stripped to the barest of meaning, these texts by Rukeyser and Coontz point to how women can be anything, and they most certainly can be more than just muses or complacent figures. Sometimes, this requires concessions like the ones that Friedan had to make. Sometimes, it is difficult to break past the imposed barriers and even harder to break past the natural ones and learn to control the fire and water within oneself. Women’s identities are fractured and isolated by society, and it takes a tremendous amount of strength to fight that.

Rukeyser, in “Waterlily Fire,” starts a conversation that prompts a response in the line that she uses to end this sequence: “I speak to you / you speak to me” (410). The conversation that Rukeyser started is still a conversation today. The fracturing and isolation have changed form, as it did when Friedan found a limited amount of strength in them, but that condition is still present and often ignored. The often-toxic dichotomy between the sexes is treated as though it is natural, but Rukeyser shows this conflict in a different light. She shows it as an unnatural, imposed state that can always be beaten out by what is natural, what is elemental, because nature will always overtake the limitations imposed on women by men. The presence of some natural barriers implies that all others are unnatural, and unnaturalness tends to have the connotation of bad. A woman’s identity is often portrayed not only by how she presents herself but also by how other people perceive her. This fact is seen in the media today, as women are often automatically deemed the liar in any situation where they make accusations against men. Ultimately, in her poem “Waterlily Fire,” Rukeyser moves beyond what can be seen in her essay “Many Keys” and in Coontz’s “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique” by creating a world where a woman’s strength can be derived from more than divisiveness and by creating the start of a conversation that is hopeful for more than a metaphorical liberation.

Works Cited

Coontz, Stephanie. “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique.” A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. Basic Books, 2011, pp. 139-65.

Keenaghan, Eric. “There is no glass woman: Muriel Rukeyser’s lost feminist essay, ‘Many Keys.’” Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 1, nos.1-2, 2018, pp. 186-204, Taylor and Francis Online DOI:10.1080/24692921.2017.1368883.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Many Keys,” edited by Eric Keenaghan. Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 1, nos. 1-2, 2018, pp. 186-204, Taylor and Francis Online, doi:10.1080/24692921.2017.1368883.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Waterlily Fire.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. U of Pittsburgh P, 2005, pp. 405-10.

“Most demonstrators and marchers did not worry over fine points of strategy; they were simply ‘against the war’” (Bricks and Phelps 141). This sentiment of undirected defiance resonated with the radicalism that emerged in the 1960s protests of the Vietnam War. Even more pertinent, the same sentiments reverberate today. When I was first writing this essay, in the fall of 2019, there had been several protests in Hong Kong throughout the entire year. The citizens of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR) were fighting for their democracy, which had been infringed upon by the Chinese government. These protests, while growing in number, appeared to be unsuccessful and had become dangerous for university students. The students had been confined to their institutions for learning—places designated for free thought — and were subjected to tear gas bombings because of their opposition. But political demonstrations proliferated not only in Hong Kong at that time.

In fact, there were several civil rights protests in the United States that had been reimagined as if it were the 1960s. There were protests resisting the reemergence of anti-abortion attitudes coupled with near-total-bans on abortion legislations in the South and Midwest in hopes of revoking Roe v. Wade. There was an outcry by the Black and Hispanic communities to end police brutality and end the inhumane conditions of ICE detention centers at the US-Mexico border. While protesting became typical in 2019, the standard became embedded into U. S.’s norm in the summer of 2020 with over a two-month period of Black Lives Matter Movement protesting police brutality sparking a global demonstration.  Although these examples show that protesting has become a common way for citizens to express their frustrations with the current political regime, the process itself has become stagnant, rarely resulting in change. For example, from 2013 to 2019, three percent of police brutality cases were brought against police officers, and only one percent resulted in convictions (Vox as stated by mapping police violence).¹ Despite discussions and demonstrations on civil rights injustices by impactful leaders and movements such as Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960s, almost sixty years later, civil rights and bodily autonomy is still up for debate in Congress.² In this tumultuous era of global civil wars and mass protests, should we consider an alternate means of activism?

The answer does not reside in a neat box; however Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Breaking Open” begins to unearth what it means to be an activist. We often try to condense our solution in the hopes of solving all facets of the problem, but the complexity that is found in many aspects of the issue does not allow for a simplified resolution. When the literary critic, Barry Wallenstein, refers to reading Muriel Rukeyser’s poems as “a way into conditions not reducible to the formulas of political arguments,” he is indicating that poetry does more than address a current political crisis. It is also creates a connection the audience feels when experiencing the author’s sentiments through his or her text (52).³    Rukeyser refers to this connection as “coming[s]-together,” which later becomes a motif in her poetry (“Poetry” 18).

The simply stated “coming-together” is hard to achieve in terms of political activism, though. Our failure stems from the lack of creative solutions and the narrow perspective that only validates our own opinion.⁴ In his article “Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Poetry,” Wallenstein argues that readers confuse poetry with the “social genesis,” or the socio-political problem that motivates an author to write, instead of thinking of the texts as standing alone devoid of current implications. He asserts the need for “objective intelligence,” for an unbiased perspective that allows for the sentiments of the text to hold and shake the reader’s convictions when analyzing poetry. Although protests and activism are not explicitly related to poetry, they are still comparable in the rigidity in keeping one’s own biases. Wallenstein insists that if a reader “watches for expressions that verify his own ideas, he is sidetracked to anticipate confirmation of [the] idea,” ignoring the poem itself and projecting their judgment on to the text. This approach to poetry does not enlarge the reader’s perspective, but narrows the application of the work, inhibiting change. Like poetry, traditional activism—defined by mass protesting—has led us into a confirmation bias. We believe we are making a difference without evidence of such preventing us from reflecting on new approaches that not only shake our own preconceived notions, but the perspective of the opposing party as well. Therefore, a creative solution is needed to transcend this problem.

Wallenstein’s idea of objective intelligence, which allows the relationship between the audience and the poem to prosper, is mirrored in Muriel Rukeyser’s belief in togetherness. Rukeyser posits that poetry is as natural and innate to humans as speech is to communication, an undertaking which she characterizes as a human activity. Her first Clark Lecture, “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact” (1968), presents such human experience with a unique perspective. She compares the human experience to the repetition found in poetry. She claims the recurrences in our existence are “the parable that poetry actually is in our lives,” demonstrating how reiterations in poetry can assist us as we try to better understand ourselves (2). Rukeyser states that “the movement, the curve of emotion in a poem, is something deeply human,” thus relating the emotions induced by poetry as a part of the human experience (5). She acknowledges that the “curve of emotion” inspires a profound interrelatedness between those who have experienced the poem. The uniting force of the poem propagates the human experience, it is how we “come-together.” If we are able to replicate such an experience provided by reading a poem, then our everyday interactions will amount to a newly found form of activism.

To manifest this experience, we need to be vessels permitting the past access to the present through our interactions. Yet this is not an easy feat to complete.⁵ There is a sense of hopelessness that is situated in activism, which, at times, can overwhelm our senses. The emergence of angry activism suggests a passionate absorption of our ideals and our reluctance to change them. It results in a violent execution of our cause more than the goal of using our activism for what Wallenstein calls “social genesis.” The frustrations and hopelessness found in angry activism parallels Rukeyser’s idea of the “powerlessness of poetry” (“Poetry” 10). She defines the “powerlessness of poetry” as a constant; it is steady and unchanging. Similarly, the feelings experienced in angry activism produce stagnation. There is energy, but it lacks focus. Nevertheless, the curve of emotion is intrinsic, and becomes a linear relationship within the human experience.

Rukeyser uses the analogy of an infant crying to explain the complications that arise with the “powerlessness of poetry” and essentially our helplessness in times of crisis. In comparing ourselves to babies, we can begin to comprehend how our activism is powerless only when it lacks communication. Our all-encompassing emotions limit our expression of distress. Although a baby is weak, it is able to survive due to the power it has to evoke action in others (11). Rukeyser’s argument proposes that there is potential strength in such hopelessness. In using our ability to elicit passionate responses from others, we can transform traditional protest into activism that ensures change.

In the late 1960s, when Muriel Rukeyser was writing the poems in her book Breaking Open (1973), America’s political Left tried to revise its outlook on activism by encouraging inclusion and creating a diverse environment for change. In Radicals in America, Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps note how the Vietnam War (1955-1975) became a catalyst for transforming the New Left, thus spurring many radicalized movements, including women’s liberation, Black nationalism, and gay liberation (122). Rukeyser, who always considered herself a radical, a leftist, and an activist, was inspired by the diversification of the New Left while writing the title poem of her volume. “Breaking Open” speaks to the confusion and violence during the Vietnam War and the hopelessness of the continued disregard of the situation by the American people. In her poem, Rukeyser asserts that “the personal ‘unconscious’ is the personal history,” thus suggesting our thoughts and experiences in the past hold information that can be used to combat issues in the present (522). If we believe each person is a part of the history that we bring to the present with us, then the consciousness we share through the connectedness of history can allow for a new form of activism that transcends helplessness.

Before we can proceed to activism, what Wallenstein calls “social genesis” needs to be recognized. The beginning of “Breaking Open” establishes Rukeyser’s incentive for writing: the feeling of despair and helplessness generated by the Vietnam War, as well as a lack of empathy in the world that encourages disconnection. She recalls herself:

Walking in the elevator at Westbeth

Yelling in the empty stainless-steel

Room like the room of this tormented year.

Like the year

The metal nor absorbs nor reflects

My yelling.

My pulled face looks at me

From the steel walls. (“Breaking Open” 522)

Rukeyser’s helplessness is pervasive in this excerpt. The staccato-like rhythm of each line provides a languid reading that conveys her powerlessness as she walks into the elevator. There is no sense of urgency or purpose. Yet the frustrated yelling that comes soon after displaces the reader. The shift to an ecstatic state is disarming for her audience because Rukeyser physically expresses her vulnerability, which has only been implied thus far in the text. She juxtaposes the “empty stainless-steel” elevator to that of the “tormented year” to denote the lack of support for the Vietnam War and the impersonal responses of the U.S citizens to it. Nevertheless, the yelling is cathartic. The repetition of yelling in her poem offers a human experience, which enables Rukeyser to work out her thoughts and find her voice; she states, “my yelling.”  It is a moment of vulnerability, but it also evokes agency demonstrated by her “pulled face” looking back at her in the elevator. The reflection of her “pulled face” signifies determination and action, which are shown more fully in the following stanza about her trip to Washington, D.C.

Readers are on an emotional journey with Rukeyser in the elevator. The “curve of emotion,” as she calls it in “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact,” is strong, creating a bond between the author and her audience. This bond permits a dialogue whereby the reader is included in Rukeyser’s narration:

Naked among the silence of my own time

and Zig Zag Zag that last letter

            of a secret or forgotten alphabet

shaped like our own last letter but it means

Something in our experience you do not know. (“Breaking Open” 521)

In the passage above, Rukeyser is being open about the helplessness that she feels and about the disregard Americans have for the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Rukeyser indicates that she is “naked among the silence,” suggesting her vulnerable side caused by the injustices displayed all over the world. Being bare is one of the most fragile human experiences, and Rukeyser candidly compares her emotions and her frail state of mind to “naked[ness].” She further conveys her weakness at that moment by stating that she is uncovered “among the silence,” which is indicative of the transparency of her fragility in the inaction of the world. The American people are “silent,” and Rukeyser considers their (and her) passivity a form of culpability.

            By comparing the Vietnamese alphabet to that of English letters, Rukeyser establishes a connection between the two cultures to encourage empathy on the part of Americans. The “Zig Zag Zag that last letter of a secret or forgotten alphabet” simulates the action of writing the letter “Z” in the English alphabet. The Vietnamese alphabet is similar to that of the English alphabet, a fact Rukeyser uses to show Americans their commonality with the Vietnamese and thus provoke interest in the cause of peace. This move begins the stages of empathy. However, the “last letter,” “Z,” is a “secret” because it is one of the four letters in the English alphabet not found in the Vietnamese alphabet.⁶ The “forgotten alphabet” denotes our stoppage, the termination of the recurrences that enable us to have a shared experience with each other.⁷  Rukeyser condemns Americans for the disruption in our connected consciousness with Vietnamese people through her statement, “Something in our experience you do not know.” In using the pronoun “you,” the statement becomes pointed and accusatory of the reader, but it also evokes action from them. 

Similar to the vulnerability of an infant’s cry, Rukeyser is able to use her fragility to evoke action within her community. This creates a sense of positivism, which she shares with those around her:

Looking out at the river

the city-flow seen as river

the flow seen as a flow of possibility

and I too to that sea. (“Breaking Open” 521)

Common to much of Rukeyser’s poetry, the motif of rivers arises to represent the fluidity in human interactions. Here, Rukeyser juxtaposes the natural exuberance of a river to the mechanical dynamics of city life when she states, “Looking out at the river / the city-flow seen as river.” In comparing these unlikely features of life, Rukeyser is bringing awareness to how the human experience mirrors nature, no matter how far removed we might be. It suggests that human life is governed by a sense of connection and implores the United States to adhere to this union. This belief motivates Rukeyser’s optimism, and now she is able to act against the Vietnam War. The lines “the flow seen as a flow of possibility / and I too to that sea” express her belief in shared human experiences. It gives her confidence that the American people will do what is necessary to address the injustices that surround them. 

For Rukeyser, the idea of the “unverifiable fact” is essential for her activism; it is the process that creates a shared experience. She defines it as the act of coming into the present, “to the moment in our own experience, unknown to each other, partly known” (“Poetry” 4). Rukeyser comprehends the knowledge each individual has obtained from the past. She understands how that information is carried with us to the current moment: It is presented through our interactions, thus transferring from one person to the next. In this transference is “the signs of the recognition in recurrence … in what is recognizable across the world, across race and life story, and the nature of beliefs” (4). This process of the unverifiable fact is in essence similar to “the cloud” in modern-day parlance, a shared experience of humans stored in the “same state of being” (5).

One subsection of Rukeyser’s poem begins “Written on the plane,” recorded in a note-like fashion (“Breaking Open” 522). This section narrates her thoughts about shared consciousness:

The conviction that what is meant by the unconscious is the same as what is meant by

history. The collective unconscious is the living history brought to the present in

consciousness, waking or sleeping. The personal “unconscious” is the personal history.

This is an identity. (“Breaking Open” 522)

History is not as grounded in facts for Muriel Rukeyser as many assume it is; instead, it is created from the collective subjectivity of each individual’s experience. In the first line, Rukeyser equates the “unconscious” with “what is meant by history,” a radical point of view that suggests the continuation of history and its effects as current. Rukeyser suggests there is no upper or lower bounds to history by comparing the past to a person’s unconscious. This rejects traditional thinking about history as a definite point that ends before the present begins. Hints of the unverifiable fact echo through her statement that the “collective unconscious is the living history brought to the present in consciousness.” This statement creates a new definition for history grounded in the collective “personal history,” thus suggesting an exchange can be made in the present to help build a better foundation for our future. 

One of Rukeyser’s many characteristics is her fondness of combining innovative thoughts with her activist work. Previously in her life, with the long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), she had used the form of documentary poetry to raise awareness about the many workers who contracted and died from silicosis. “Breaking Open” is no different, since it also uses thoughts on philosophy to reimagine the way we see activism. By approaching activism as a way of forming a shared consciousness, there is an individual responsibility placed on the readers of her poem. It does not suggest grand gestures, yet it still maintains the same urgency as a poem that serves as a direct call to action would. Wallenstein’s argument about the creation of the relationship between the poem and the audience’s open mind while experiencing a text lays the foundation for my understanding of Rukeyser’s unverifiable fact. For the transference to commence in the unverifiable fact there needs to be receptivity, a “naked[ness]” of all individuals. The opening scene of “Breaking Open” demonstrates that a lack of receptivity results in the continuing suffering of others. We cannot be passive in our activism, nor do we need to be angry. Rukeyser hopes for a balance between the two, where we as individuals can practice openness and vulnerability while fostering our own agency.

Works Cited

Brick, Howard and Christopher Phelps. “The Revolution Will Be Live, 1965-1973.” Radicals inAmerica: The U.S Left Since the Second World War. Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 121-72.

Bult, Laura. “A Timeline of 1,944 Black Americans Killed by Police.” Vox, Vox, 30 June 2020, www.vox.com/2020/6/30/21306843/black-police-killings.

Nash, Elizabeth, et al. “State Policy Trends at Mid-Year 2019: States Race to Ban or Protect Abortion.” Guttmacher Institute, 11 Nov. 2019, www.guttmacher.org/article/2019/07/state-policy-trends-mid-year-2019-states-race-ban-or-protect-abortion.

Truong, Donny. “Vietnamese Typography.” Alphabet Vietnamese Typography, 2018,vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Breaking Open.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. U of Pittsburgh P, 2005, pp. 521-29.             

—. “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact.” The Clark Lectures. Scripps College, 1968, pp. 1-21.

Wallenstein, Barry. “Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Poetry.” Margins, nos. 24-26, 1975, pp. 52+. Independent Voices.

CHARACTERS

MURIEL: Muriel Rukeyser. An activist and poet, Jewish. Begins the play in her mid-thirties.

FRIEND 1: A friend of Muriel’s, any gender, Jewish.

FRIEND 2: Same as Friend 1.

FRIEND 3: An activist friend of Muriel’s, Black, any gender.

NEWSCASTER: A radio host, male.

PRIME MINISTER: A future nondescript Prime Minister of Israel, male.

SCENE 1

A New York City apartment, May 14, 1948.                                                              

Morning. A large clock on the wall shows that the time is just past 9 AM. A group of thirtysomethings is huddled around a radio at the kitchen table. The young adults listen intently as a voice emerges out of the radio.

NEWSCASTER: We are receiving word that just after 4 PM Tel Aviv time, David Ben-Gurion, longtime leader of the Jewish people in Palestine, read a Declaration of Independence for a Jewish nation in Palestine to be named “Eretz Yisrael.” This land of Israel will certainly be welcomed by the many Jews across the world still seeking refuge after the fall of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. We were able to access the radio broadcast of Mister Ben-Gurion reading this said Declaration, which we’ll play for you folks at home now.

            (A shaky voice comes over the radio and begins speaking in Hebrew, reading the Declaration of Independence: “B-Eretz Yisrael kam ha’am ha’yehudit…”)

            (The radio fades to white noise as FRIEND 1 turns the dial down low, but not all the way off.)

FRIEND 1: My, I never did think I would see the day.

FRIEND 2: It’s truly something of a miracle, isn’t it?

FRIEND 1: Yes, something of a miracle. And after all we’ve been through, a well-deserved miracle at that.

MURIEL: Well-deserved, yes. We have fought, of that there is no doubt. But they have fought tremendously more. In a time like this, one cannot help but think of the men and women in the Warsaw ghetto, weaponless against what must have seemed like the whole world, or the men and women moving freely in Russia, fleeing the pogroms. And now they, we, have Palestine. They have planted it, they are taking a fierce oath to never put down their arms.¹

FRIEND 2: And I suspect they’ll never have a chance to.

FRIEND 1: How do you suppose?

FRIEND 2:  I can’t imagine the Arabs are too pleased. From what I’ve heard, they think the land belongs to them, too.

MURIEL: This land can belong to many peoples if they choose to share. What matters most is the safety of a people long forced into hiding, death and discomfort. If someone is not pleased, they should know: since the beginning of time, the Jew has been equipped for fighting.²

            (The stage lights fade, save for a single spotlight on the clock which rapidly ticks forward as MURIEL, FRIEND 1, and FRIEND 2 exit. The clock keeps ticking until it reaches midnight.)

            (The volume of the radio increases slowly until the voice of the NEWSCASTER can be heard.)

NEWCASTER: We are receiving breaking news that in the early hours of the morning, the newly established State of Israel was attacked on all fronts by its neighbors in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and the Emirate of Transjordan. Folks, this is coming just mere hours after this infant nation signed its Declaration of Independence. Not quite the neighborly welcome one might have hoped for, if you ask me. What we’re seeing here could be the beginning of a long, long war.

CURTAIN

SCENE 2

Curtain opens on the same apartment in 1967. The décor has been updated to fit the time period. The radio from the first scene now sits beside a small television. MURIEL and FRIEND 3 are seated around the kitchen table having an afternoon tea. The scene opens on them amid a heated discussion.

FRIEND 3: This war, Muriel. This war is something else. Yes, it lasted only six days. But really it’s been raging for twenty years. And I reckon it’ll keep raging unless people like us do something about it.

MURIEL: Do something? Sure, but what is there to do? We all want peace, of course. That is a given. But how does one find peace when the views on either side are so opposing?

FRIEND 3: This nation, too, suffers from a case of opposing views. But we don’t give up, do we? You were there with me, those thirty-odd years ago. You saw how they treated those boys, how they tore their lives to shreds.³ You saw how our two peoples came together then. Different, sure, in upbringing and skin color and the third. But unified still against the forces that tried to push us down. Don’t you remember?

MURIEL: Yes, I remember. Of course, I remember. But I can’t turn my back now on the nation of my people, and I don’t see why I should have to.

FRIEND 3: The nation of your people; it’s taking people’s lives. It’s instigating terror, it’s stealing people’s homes!

MURIEL: I think freely, my friend. This you know of me, I’m sure. But I must agree with the notice sent out by the Anti-Defamation League just this week warning of the anti-Semitic tones these words are holding.

FRIEND 3: It’s not anti-Semitic. It’s anti-colonialism. It’s anti-settlers and anti-oppression.

MURIEL: My people are fighters, my friend. What you see as colonialist, I see as land we have earned, and the earning was not easy, might I add. We have fought for so long for our freedom and we will continue to fight to maintain it. Such is our existence.

FRIEND 3: My people have to fight, too. You know this. You fought alongside us then, but you fight against me now on this issue.

MURIEL: I don’t see any reason to not stand my ground on this.

            (FRIEND 3 pauses and stares long and hard at MURIEL. The stare is not one of disdain or hatred, but certainly one of concern and hurt. Slowly, but assuredly, and even slightly maliciously, they deliver the next line:)

FRIEND 3:    

Beat out continuance in the choking veins

before emotion betrays us, and we find

staring behind our faces, accomplices of death.

Not to die, but slowly to validate our lives.⁴

MURIEL: (Taken aback, but not necessarily offended; intrigued.) Why recite my own lines to me? I know what I’ve said. You think that I’m ignorant or turning a blind eye. I assure you, my friend, that I am doing neither. I understand the issues you are raising; I see where you are coming from. But I ask you this: would you not do anything, have you not done everything, for the safety of your people?

            (A beat. FRIEND 3 looks sadly upon their companion.)

FRIEND 3: (Poignantly)

How did they wish, grandparents of these wars,

what cataracts of ambition fell across their brains?⁵

(This line hangs in the air, and, for a moment, neither of them speaks or moves. After a moment MURIEL leans back in her chair and smiles. This smile is not condescending, nor is it of happiness. Rather, it comes from a bliss of making peace with the fact that the conversation has no easy conclusion.)

FRIEND 3: (Sighs) I love you, Muriel, and I always will. But someone has changed. Is it you, or is it I?

MURIEL: (still smiling) Neither of us has changed, my friend. (She takes a sip of her tea.)

The world has.

CURTAIN

SCENE 3

An imagined future, sometime in the future, perhaps one hundred years, perhaps a thousand. Setting is the Jewish afterlife, Olam HaBaa (translation: the world to come), which is neither heaven nor hell. Many well-known Jewish figures are present, including PRIME MINISTER. He and MURIEL are in conversation when the scene begins.

MURIEL: So, I am to understand, Mister Prime Minister, that the war really did continue all those years after my passing? I was certain at some point they would cede to us and realize that this nation can fight, and will fight, for eternity.

PRIME MINISTER: No, motek, if anything the violence only got worse during my time leading our people. Wars and bombs coming from every direction, without my push for retaliation, we would never have survived.

MURIEL: So, whatever happened? How did it all end? Was a ceasefire reached or was the land split into two?

PRIME MINISTER: (laughing) No, no, neither of those. No negotiation would ever work for the Arabs. They always wanted more, always wanted to take what was rightfully ours. I would never allow it, I could never allow it. My people looked to me to defend the land we fought for so diligently for so many years.

            (MURIEL nods in listening rather than agreement.)

PRIME MINISTER: No, the only way to keep ourselves safe was to get rid of them, once and for all.

            (A beat. MURIEL looks taken aback)

MURIEL: Get rid of them?

PRIME MINISTER: Of course! They wouldn’t relent and they wouldn’t negotiate. So, I pulled some strings. Called my allies; you know, the US and Russia, all the big players. I made the arrangements, and finally, after years of torment, it was done. We were free at last.

MURIEL: But, what do you mean?

PRIME MINISTER: Well, we flattened them. Every last one of them. Every Palestinian town and village, every last man, woman, and child. We wanted to spare some, of course, but at some point, it became too much of a danger to let any stick around. So, we obliterated them.

MURIEL: (in disbelief) I … I don’t understand. Millions of lives, gone in an instant?

PRIME MINISTER: You must understand, Muriel. It was either us or them. Had we not done it to them, they would have done it to us.

MURIEL: All the blood spilled…I cannot comprehend such an atrocity. Generations wiped out, a native people erased from history.

PRIME MINISTER: Well, Muriel. (He smiles coyly.) Whenever you are fighting for that which you believe in, the blood is justified.

            (Exit PRIME MINISTER. The lights dim halfway. MURIEL stands alone in the center of   the stage, facing the audience directly. She muses on these last words, a hopeless sense of knowing creeping up on her. For a moment, she appears as though she may cry, but she holds her chin up strongly to counter it. She falls to her knees, head in her hands. The stage goes black.)

CURTAIN

THE END

Notes for “The Blood Is Justified”

1. This passage is adapted directly from Rukeyser’s essay for the “Under Forty” feature in a 1944 issue of Contemporary Jewish Record.

2. See note 1.

3. The Scottsboro Boys.

4. This is the opening stanza to Rukeyser’s own poem “The Blood is Justified” (68).

5. These lines are excerpted from later in Rukeyser’s poem “The Blood Is Justified” (70).

A critical self-reflection on “The Blood Is Justified”

On May 14, 1948, nearly three years after the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the Jewish death camps, the Israeli Declaration of Independence was signed. This monumental event was seen at the time as a much-needed establishment of safety for Jewish people after the extermination of more than six million European Jews. The establishment of a Jewish state was celebrated by Jews and gentiles alike around the world, but excitement quickly turned to fear and urgency when the infant nation was attacked by its neighboring countries the very next day. So began a tumultuous battle between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians/Arab non-Jews, a battle which continues to rage on today some seventy years later. At the beginning of this conflict, diaspora Jews and liberal activists alike were in agreement that Israel’s existence was integral to protecting the Jewish nation from further harm. This support could be seen particularly within student activist communities at the time who were embroiled in combatting racism and anti-Semitism nationally and globally. Jewish students found the intersection of issues surrounding racism against Black Americans and anti-Semitism to be of particular concern, as the two seemed to be intrinsically linked in the 1930s and 1940s. As Britt Haas writes in her book Fighting Authoritarianism, “[I]n the 1930s, concerns about racism extended not only to African Americans but to Jews as well, and in this more comprehensive view of race relations, youth activists’ internationalist perspective was manifest” (77). The understanding amongst student activists that Jews were a targeted minority both domestically and abroad surely played into the desire and support for a Jewish state in Palestine.

It was several decades before the tide within some liberal communities began to change. In 1967, a vicious six-day war erupted between Israeli armed forces and neighboring Arab states, with many in liberal circles seeing Israel as the instigator of the violence. According to Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps in their book Radicals in America, “As Israel [in 1967] occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, many radicals […] objected to Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian Arabs and described Israel as a ‘settler-colonialist’ state in a U.S.-dominated imperialist world system” (239). However, while some facets of the liberal American movements began to shift their tone regarding Israel’s presence in Palestine, “many American Jews saw Israel’s vulnerability as the war’s main lesson, leading to stronger identification with Israel” (239). Brick and Phelps go on to note that “[m]ainline Jewish groups […] typically labeled American Jews who criticized Israel’s suppression of Palestinian rights as ‘self-hating’ and other critics simply as anti-Semitic” (239). As I previously established, young Jews made up a strong section of activist communities, so this tension between criticism and unwavering support for the Israeli government put many Jewish liberals in an uncomfortable position in which two of their core values were in direct conflict with one another.

As both a Jewish woman and a student at the time that fascism and Nazism had a stronghold in Europe, it is thus inevitable[ED1]  that poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser would find herself in the middle of this above-mentioned dichotomy. Rukeyser, born in 1913, though admittedly more of a cultural Jew than a religious one, was in a unique position to use her writing to address issues of oppression. In her 1944 piece for the Contemporary Jewish Record, immediately after she admiringly mentions “the men and women, planting Palestine and taking a fierce oath never to put down their arms,” she muses:

To me, the value of my Jewish heritage, in life and in writing, is its value as a guarantee. Once one’s responsibility as a Jew is really assumed, one is guaranteed, not only against fascism, but against many kinds of temptation to close the spirit. It is a strong force in oneself against many kinds of hardness which may arrive in the war- the idea that when you throw off insight, you travel light and are equipped for fighting; the ideas that it is impractical to plan and create, and that concrete and invention are the only practical things, apart from killing. (Statement 9)

In this passage, notably written toward the end of the Second World War and only a few years before the establishment of the State of Israel, Rukeyser suggests that being Jewish necessitates an inherent desire to fight back against oppressive forces. She likewise emphasizes the importance not of having an established plan or means to an end, but of taking advantage of the opportunity to establish and build wherever it may present itself. This stance seems to be somewhat at odds with  positions Rukeyser previously took surrounding  the justification of practicing Colonialism  as a means of obtaining land or comfort.

Rukeyser’s anti-colonialist sentiments can be best seen in her poem sequence “The Blood Is Justified,” which was published as a part of her 1935 book of poetry Theory of Flight. This book and sequence of poems directly addresses the case of the Scottsboro Nine, which Rukeyser herself witnessed and reported on as young journalist and by which she was, of course, deeply disturbed. Though this poem is responding to the injustices imposed upon Native Americans at the hands of white colonialist Americans, the parallels between the language she uses in the poem and her Zionist rhetoric in later years is uncanny. From the very first stanza, Rukeyser expresses her deep discomfort with the brutality of treatment that Natives faced. She opens:

Beat out continuance in the choking veins

before emotion betrays us, and we find

staring behind our faces, accomplices of death.

Not to die, but slowly to validate our lives[.] (Collected 68)

In these opening lines, Rukeyser is expressing what must be interpreted as white guilt, noting her anxiety at looking too far inward at her white lineage and finding something sinister, some “accomplices of death.”

By the third stanza, Rukeyser is addressing head-on the issue of stolen and misappropriated artefacts, writing:

Living they move on a canvas of centuries

restored from death in artful poses, found

once more by us, descendants, foraging,

ravelling time back over American ground.

How did they wish, grandparents of these wars,

what cataracts of ambition fell across their brains? (69)

The final two lines of this stanza are especially notable when comparing this poem to more modern anti-Zionist sentiments in that they address the ways in which ancestors’ decisions can haunt the consciences of later generations. She further acknowledges this type of generational trauma towards the end of the poem:

My generation feeds

the wise assault on your anticipation, 

repeating historic sunderings, betraying our fathers,

all parricidal in our destinies. (70)

Her poignant mention of parricide, or the killing of a parent, can be understood as referring both to the killing of generations beforehand by white settlers as well as the shame a parent may feel at their child’s “radical” opinions. The poem overall uses imagery of bloodshed, death, and mutilation that is meant to unsettle its audience in such a way that makes the support of something like Native genocide or oppression nearly impossible. The title itself, “The Blood is Justified,” is Rukeyser’s cheeky way of communicating that no amount of land or wealth or pride is worth the lives of others.       

Rukeyser maintained a complicated relationship with Zionism throughout her lifetime, given that she, at different points in her life, felt different levels of connection with her Jewish identity, all the while retaining a commitment to combatting white supremacy and injustice. Her mother claimed lineage from the first-century Jewish scholar Akiba, and her 1968 poem entitled “Akiba” addresses the events that were unfolding in the disputed territory at the time. The poem details a brief history of the Jews in the Middle East, and Rukeyser compares them to other persecuted minorities throughout history:

Those at flaming Nauvoo,

the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,

swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris

In interpreting this comparison, it is clear that Rukeyser is aware of the damage done by anti-Native ideologies of generations past, but she is unable to transitively and preemptively apply those same sentiments to issues regarding native Palestinians. Since she passed away in 1980, it’s important to note that a vast majority of American Jews of the time, liberal or not, were still supportive of the actions of the Israeli government. However, in the nearly forty years since her passing, the discourse around Zionism within liberal Jewish diasporic communities has shifted greatly, with a much higher percentage of this group identifying less with Zionist ideals. This shift in understanding when taken in tandem with Rukeyser’s own personal beliefs about oppression begs the question: If she were alive today, would Muriel Rukeyser still be a Zionist?

In my creative project, a play entitled “The Blood Is Justified,” I seek to show Muriel, a fictional interpretation of Rukeyser, grappling with and understanding Zionism at three different stages. A play was the most natural option to tackle this daunting subject not only because it was one of Rukeyser’s media of choice, but also because the format of a staged play allows for movement through time as well as the suspension of disbelief, thus allowing for themes and settings both fictional and fantastical. The first scene shows Muriel as a young woman hearing about the establishment of the State of Israel in real-time. For this moment of triumph for the Jewish people, which took place within Rukeyser’s lifetime, I lift much of her dialogue directly from her own writing. Since the specific passages used were written in 1944, less than five years prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Israel, I find it safe to assume that the sentiments she expressed in her writing would be consistent with what she felt on that day. The arguable hypocrisy of these sentiments is apparent when compared with Rukeyser’s own words regarding the damaging effects of intruding on Native spaces, as seen in the next scene.

The second scene moves nearly twenty years into the future and features Muriel in conversation with a friend of hers from the activist community. It is noted in the character descriptions that this friend is Black, which helps to incorporate Brick and Phelps’ comments regarding the closeness of many young Black and Jewish activists during the Civil Rights Movement. This friend is frustrated that Muriel does not see the indiscretions being committed against Palestinians by Israel, and their argument comes to a head when the friend directly quotes Muriel’s own poem “The Blood Is Justified” to her. I include this section to highlight the inconsistencies of the real Rukeyser’s opinions surrounding this subject matter; her early statements on the brutal treatment of Native Americans directly contradicts her justifications for a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine. In the play, when her friend again uses her own words to gently acknowledge her lack of insight, she can only accept the criticism, but not really respond to it.

Finally, the last scene is set in the afterlife in some future, near or distant, and puts Muriel in eager conversation with a nondescript future Prime Minister of Israel. She is excited to learn what solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine was finally achieved, only to be appalled when it is revealed that total destruction of Palestine was the method eventually used to achieve “peace.” When she asks how such a horrendous act could be committed, the Prime Minister sinisterly replies that “the blood is justified,” leading to a moment of tormented clarity for Muriel.

I feel it is important to note that, with this project, I am in no way suggesting that Rukeyser or any self-identified Zionist is abhorrent, evil, or ignorant. The final scene is inspired by what I believe may unfortunately be the outcome of the conflict in Israel, especially when the nation is led by neo-fascists such as Bibi Netanyahu, upon whom the character of the Prime Minister is based. Rather, my goal in engaging with this project is to shed light on the holes in the arguments of some Zionists, specifically ones within liberal and activist communities. The parallels between the ways Rukeyser describes the tragedy of the genocide of Native peoples in her poem “The Blood Is Justified” and the modern discourse surrounding Zionism and Israel are simply uncanny. In the end, there is, of course, no way to know how Rukeyser would align herself regarding this issue were she alive today, but one can only hope that the sympathies extended to Native Americans would be justly extended to native Palestinians as well.

Works Cited

Brick, Howard and Christopher Phelps. “Over the Rainbow, 1980-1989.” Radicals in America:

The U.S. Left since the Second World War.Cambridge UP, 2016,pp. 238-239.

Haas, Britt. “The Scottsboro Boys: Demands for Equality from the Deep South to New York

City.” Fighting Authoritarianism: American Youth Activism in the 1930s. Fordham UP,

2017, pp. 61-81. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet E. Kaufman and

Anne Herzog with Jan Heller-Levi, U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.

Rukeyser, Muriel. Statement for “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the

Younger Generation of American Jews.” Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 7, no. 1

(Feb. 1, 1944), pp. 3-9.

6:00 AM

The alarm clock begins its song and dance promptly as the time strikes six, ringing out and shaking Marie out of her dreams. She rubs her eyes open, forcing herself up and swinging her legs around and over the side of the bed. The sunlight sneaks its way through the translucent curtains, lighting up Marie’s small apartment with its golden dew, preparing the start of a new day.

But first, coffee.

After twenty silent minutes of steady caffeine consumption, Marie shuffles from her chair in the kitchen back to her bedroom. She sheds her comfy clothes, replacing them with athletic leggings and a tank top: A productive morning begins with an active body.

Her sneakers smack against the pavement as she finishes off the last few strides of her daily three-mile run. Her pace slows as she nears the front of her apartment building, averting her gaze as she passes the local squatter who always insists for Marie to stop and chat. She used to oblige, spending her free few minutes after runs to talk with him; that is until the groping incident. Since that day Marie would give a smile and a quick wave, never allowing him the opportunity to strike up a conversation, often pretending she was on the phone or late for work.

7:00 AM

She shuffles up the stairwell, making her way back to the apartment a little after seven. Finally, making progress. She had been keeping up with her morning ritual for a while now, but she is just beginning to see a difference in her speed. She peels off her clothes and slips into the bathroom for a quick shower before getting ready for class.

Aeronautical Engineering certainly isn’t what everyone imagines when deciding which field is best for them, but for Marie there was no question. She grew up captivated by the idea of flight, as was her mother, who shared countless stories, reminiscent of the wild romance she had shared with her late husband, who himself was an extraordinary pilot. Her mother always dreamt of flying herself, as her first love had, but she was never given the same opportunities, her aspirations always remaining outside of her grasp. She often watched and supported him from the sidelines, as he lived out her fantasies. Marie never forgot the sound of sorrow in her mother’s voice when she spoke of this man; it was like he took fragments of her with him. For Marie, flight meant something entirely different. She is interested in flight as a manifestation of freedom and expression, as her mother was, but the mere creation of flight is what fascinates Marie even more. The fact that she could create something that could soar so freely above through her own hard work and effort, that she could make miracles out of blood, sweat, and metal. It had always been her dream and her mother supports her, pushing Marie to pursue the freedom of flight she herself was never able to fully attain.

After several minutes, Marie made her way out of her room, ready for the day ahead of her. She’s dressed casually, perfect for her shift at the bar later, but still neat enough for her day of classes. Not that anyone’s keeping tabs. She grabs her bag and phone off the counter before locking the door of the apartment and heading out to class.

8:00 AM

She walks down the street at a steady pace, only a couple blocks away from the university. She hears the vicious chants before she can even see the sign reading Planned Parenthood in big letters. Protesters line the sidewalks, waving signs proclaiming their love for Christ while they shout slurs of hatred at the women whom the yellow-coated volunteers escort into the abortion facility. Marie walks by, scanning the crowd of people until she makes eye contact with a young girl, no older than sixteen. The girl clings to a volunteer’s arm, breaking her gaze with Marie, and walks swiftly with her head down, attempting to block out the cacophony of accusatory screams and signs pictured with gruesome depictions of small dismantled corpses. Marie moves along past the building, worried that if she delays much longer, she will be late.

She enters the classroom within a few minutes and takes a seat a few rows from the front of the room. A few minutes later, when the rest of the students have filled in, class begins. Pushing through the strain of the three-hour lecture, Marie sharpens her attention, filing away her professor’s words for when she can put them to good use. As the professor reaches out to the class with questions, she is alert and responsive. With each passing day, she prepares herself for the career of her dreams, safeguarding the freedom of expression that her mother was never able to consistently capture.

The class eventually comes to an end and the students funnel out of the lecture center. Marie packs her items and walks to the front of the class, introducing herself to the professor before accompanying him to his office, to inquire about the lecture and a past assessment. He searches the computer for her grade among the other scores, eventually tensing his brows in confusion.

Marie offers: “If it isn’t coming up it may be under my full name: Anne Marie.” He locates her test and after their brief discussion, they exchange a smile and part ways.

11:00 AM

Grumbles ripple against the walls of her stomach as she makes her way down the street to the café. As soon as she opens the door, a wave of warm, cinnamon-scented air tingles Marie’s taste buds. She pays for a large cappuccino and a muffin, then waits patiently at a small round table for her order. As she waits, a middle-aged couple’s muffled chatter from a few tables over catches her attention; specifically, the way the husband orders and ridicules the wife and the look of longing that appears on her face after he dismisses her. It’s the subtle, everyday things like this that used to take a toll on Marie’s mother.

Marie thinks back, reflecting on the men of her mother’s past who had dismissed her in the same way she had just witnessed. Her mother recalled stories of her ex-husband, Laramie; it turns out that even this man, whom her mother loved so dearly, had too many ambitions to remember that she had her own. A couple years after Laramie’s death, Marie was conceived to an ecstatic mother and an abusive drunk of a father. She hadn’t seen him since she was a child, so the memories remained fuzzy, the stories she had been told filling in the gaps of her father’s image. Although they had some fond memories, Marie’s mother doesn’t bring up her father often. When she reflects on her past romances, the first name to leave her mouth is always Laramie. Her mother used to tell Marie stories of her father as a kind man, but she would always add that people can change when they get lost in the river of life, as Marie’s father had over the years and with the help of a hefty bottle of gin. It wasn’t long after the beatings started that he left, fleeing from his battered wife and his young daughter. It was only when Marie, around age thirteen, overheard her mother deep in conversation with her Aunt Helen and found out not only that her father had raped her mother but that when she had finally gained the courage to tell someone, she was branded a liar and told that a husband cannot rape a wife.

The rattling of the coffee cup on the saucer snaps Marie out of her thoughts, just as the shaky waiter places her muffin and steaming beverage beside her. When she looks up from her cup, she notices that the couple had left. Pulling herself together, she sips her cappuccino and picks apart her muffin, while she mentally prepares herself for the long afternoon that awaits.

12:00 PM

As she walks up the stone steps of the Advisement Building, she contemplates “her plans for the future,” knowing it’ll be the first question she is asked. She checks in, taking a seat in the waiting room until a voice calls: “Anne Marie.” She rises to greet her advisor with a friendly smile and a firm handshake, then follows her back to her office where they sit amongst the strong aroma of essential oils.

As she earlier predicted: “So, Anne Marie, tell me, do you know what you want to do after graduation?”

“Please, just Marie is fine. I want to pursue graduate school, so I can continue my study of planes.”

The advisor smiles, intrigued by Marie’s unique interest: “Is that so? I’ll take it that you’ve been enjoying your studies so far then. And let’s see here your major is…oh yes, here it is. Aeronautical Engineering. Any reason behind all of the interest?”

Marie smiles softly: “There are so many reasons why, but I would say that my mother was a huge influence on me. She was always so interested in flight herself, and she was never able to pilot a plane like she had always dreamed. For me, my dream isn’t to literally fly a plane but to be one of the people a part of the process, creating new planes and technology, participating in the making of history.”

By the time she finishes talking, Marie’s smile is stretched wide across her face, her eyes bright with anticipation.

The guidance counselor transitions the conversation to a discussion of Marie’s schedule for the upcoming semester. After several minutes of planning and polite discussion, their meeting ends. Marie gives a grateful goodbye to the advisor, leaving the building with her head in the clouds, daydreaming about the future that is yet to come and her place in it.

1:00 PM

Marie approaches the back of the brown building, arriving at her first shift. She climbs the stairs and opens the door as the smell of donuts immediately rushes to greet her, along with the bakers cooking away in the back of the coffee shop. She makes her way to the front of the shop where her coworkers are busy filling coffees and taking orders, the early afternoon rush rages on. Marie jumps right in with the others, filling and heating up orders while keeping her energy levels up and her smile on.

The crowd lingers for what seems like an eternity when at last the final customer orders, leaving no more than two minutes later with a grin plastered across his caffeine-crazed face. At last there is a moment to breathe, but only for a moment, as the manager reminds everyone that they need to restock the food and brew some more coffee before the next crowd arrives.

Following her manager’s instructions, Marie makes her way to the back corner of the shop, locating the freezer room. She enters the freezer, goosebumps crawl across her skin. She shakes them off in search of the frozen eggs needed for the breakfast bagels. After a few minutes, she digs out the giant box from under a stack of milk cartons, just as the freezer door creaks with the entrance of a figure. Taken off guard by the dim light of the freezer, she steps back, tripping over the scattered boxes that surround her. A male grunt resounds as she recognizes one of her coworkers hovering over her. His hand grasps her waist, attempting to pull her close when Marie resists, slamming her bony fist into the bottom of his jaw.

She staggers over to the door, trying to catch her breath as she hisses: “Who the hell do you think you are!? Come near me again, and I’m calling the fucking cops.”

She walks cautiously to the front of the store where her peers instantaneously ask about the commotion.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, waving away their concern. “He broke something, but I handled it.”

She locates her fellow co-worker, a dramatic pout pasted on his face and a red patch spreading across his neck and jaw. She could not help but feel a bit of joy, noticing his hands trembling just as hers had been a few moments before.

7:00 PM

By the time her shift is finally over, the smell of donuts that was so sweet and welcoming to Marie at the beginning of her shift now smelled like the stale epitome of a shitty minimum wage job. Before she leaves, she gathers up her tips, exchanging the change for bills and then waving goodbye to the remaining workers at the store.

Exhausted and unmotivated to cook for herself, Marie leaves for a proper meal before her next shift. She walks into a nearby restaurant, collapses in one of the chairs that her waiter leads her to and spends the next hour fueling up for her upcoming shift.

8:00 PM

As Marie approaches the front of the bar, she digs through her bag searching for her stashed pair of pumps. She walks through the front door, grasping the black heel with one hand and waving cheerfully with the other to the group of regulars. She heads straight to the bathroom to freshen up and slip on her heels.

Her pumps click-clack along with the beat of her walk as she struts over to the bar, singing a happy hello to her coworkers. Groups begin to pile in as Marie begins taking and mixing orders, attempting her friendliest smile. She had not made a lot of tips at the coffee shop today; the freezer incident had hardened her usual “customer service face.” She presses on, forces a smile, prepares several drinks at a time, passes them along the bar, and offers friendly remarks as she goes. Occasionally, a drunken man or two will hit on Marie; as infuriating as the catcalls and ballsy jokes can be, the tips make the grotesque behavior more bearable. As long as the money is coming in, Marie has a route to attain her dream of creating planes and remaining independent.

She had listened to her mother talk about her dependence on the men in her life, and because of those stories she decided she would never rely on someone else to provide for her or to choose her life for her, a subordinate.

The night swirls by as a continuous swarm of social drinkers attach themselves to the bar. It hasn’t even begun to settle down by the time Marie packs up for the end of her shift, shuffling through a pile of bills, counting the new tip total. She makes her way out of the bar and down the street, at last making her way towards the apartment.

1:00 AM

The door of her apartment flings open as Marie hurls her limp body into the room, tossing her bag and shoes across the floor. She walks in a swayed line to the bed as she strips off each article of clothing. She collapses into her bed’s warm embrace, a sudden sigh of relief flushing over her. She has surpassed another day.

Another day in the life of a persevering woman.

Critical self-reflection: Living in history, a reflection on Rukeyser’s The Middle of the Air

Muriel Rukeyser’s unpublished play The Middle of the Air (1944-1945) provides a new perspective on feminist developments in the mid-twentieth century through its characterization of the protagonist Anne, specifically through her developing private relationship with her husband Laramie and her public relationships with sexual desire and her future aspirations. Rukeyser’s conception of feminism differs from today’s standards, shown through a change in women’s responses to instances of patriarchal domination and subordination. Because today women receive support from new laws and social support, they feel free to respond openly and firmly in instances of subordination or harassment, unlike in Rukeyser’s time when such experiences had to be dealt with strategically due to lack of societal support or understanding. This distinction is key for grasping how far women have come through the normalization of many feminist concepts, as well as for highlighting the injustices present during the time when Rukeyser wrote her text. In my short story “Another Day in the Life of a Persevering Woman,” Marie pulls the life of Rukeyser’s protagonist Anne into a new generation that is still subject to patriarchal domination at the expense of their own control and sexual autonomy. It is important to identify similar issues facing women fighting injustices in previous generations and today in order to stress how immersed our society still is in sexist ideals, such as the domination and suppression of women.

Connecting the issues of the past with the present is key to recognizing what change has been made and what other changes still need to be made. Historian Stephanie Coontz critiques Betty Friedan’s classic book The Feminist Mystique (1963) for describing women’s suffering through the narrow view of a middle-class, stay-at-home wife. Coontz points out that the book simply spreads awareness about the customary difficulties that middle-class housewives face, rather than provide solutions, suggest change, or acknowledge women of color or those of a lower-class status who experience a multitude of unacknowledged injustices. “She did not advocate that women organize to oppose the multitude of laws and practices that relegated women to second-class citizenship, restricted their access to many jobs, and gave husbands the final say over family decisions and finances” (Coontz 149). While Friedan identified issues such as women’s need for an education in order to further personal development, she did not focus on many of the basic injustices that women face on a regular basis; she also did not specify a way to provoke change besides the furthering of education; but this does not go far enough in order introduce equality into a patriarchal society. This is a key criticism by Coontz, highlighting the importance not only of understanding injustices to women but also of providing unifying solutions and acknowledging all sorts of injustices, rather than merely a middle-class white woman’s unfulfillment. In order to fully engage with Rukeyser’s work in a way that inspires change and forces self-reflection, I wrote a short story based on her play that aims to expand the reach of Rukeyser’s concepts of feminism through a sample of women’s 21^st-century struggles and accomplishments. I provide a newly developed characterization through Marie, who I present as Anne’s daughter and Anne’s feminist legacy as viewed through today’s norms.

Throughout The Middle of the Air, Rukeyser hints at several instances of normalized sexism, such as in the workplace shown through Laramie’s conversation with the woman who designed plane blueprints. After asking if the woman who created the blueprints could read them, he mentions his mentor King’s rule against women working for him (53-4). This added detail about Laramie’s assumption that this woman couldn’t understand the prints, let alone work for his mentor, shows the lack of social and professional support for women at the time. This idea is further shown through the depiction of Anne as a subordinate to Laramie, such as when he steals her poem and tweaks it for his own use. She rebutts, “That’s not to be. Not to be touched. And not to be used. You can’t do that.” He dismisses her, “It’s done. But never mind. You’d never recognize it anyway, except the title” (Rukeyser 87). His pure dismissal of Anne’s beliefs and her right to her own poetry shows the social stance of the time. Women had very little of their own, as their lives were controlled by men and they were viewed as property or sexual objects. This scene also shows that although Anne tries to rebel against Laramie, she doesn’t have enough social or legal recourse to really make a difference. Although the addition of equal rights laws has created a sense of strength and support for women nowadays, there remains the threat of the removal of our freedoms. I represent this idea in my story during the scene referencing Planned Parenthood, due to the recent uproar about Roe v. Wade (1973) in the United States. With Donald Trump as the current president, political parties continue to polarize, making many fear the reexamination of pro-choice laws under this administration—many hostile states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and so on, continue to push for the reenactment of old, abortion-banning laws. While men’s Viagra is still covered by insurance, many women’s birth control has been removed as a result of changes made by the Trump administration to the Affordable Care Act, as well as the defunding of Planned Parenthood from Title X. Even now, in 2020, society is trying to control women and their bodies. Although times have changed, Rukeyser’s concern for patriarchal injustices remains relevant. I wanted to include a resonating example in my story of the violence women have faced for centuries, so Marie’s unnamed father serves as the prime symbol of male toxicity. His character provides a commentary on the previous conceptions of a wife as a husband’s property, emotionally, physically, and sexually. Although there are sexist ideals that have persisted through history, new laws and social backings continue to drive change.

Throughout the second act of Rukeyser’s play, after her miscarriage, Anne begins to subtly offer her opinion to Laramie. She refutes his violent beliefs based in fascism: “But these are not planes, these are people” (Rukeyser 82). She also warns against his participation in King’s plan to overthrow the government: “It is corruption, and it works in corruption” (83). Although Anne goes so far as to tell Laramie he has to choose between her and King, he still chooses his mentor over her (84). As a result of the inequalities prevalent during this time period, it is understandable that even when a women tries to stand up to a man, she does so in a subordinated manner due to the lack of public laws and support to back up a bolder denial of the patriarchy. Even though Anne begins to raise her voice and her opinions, it seems that Laramie simply sees her as a means to support him while he attains his dreams. After this slight streak of rebellion, Anne tells Laramie that she chooses him, even though Laramie has chosen King, thus prioritizing his own self-interest. But at this time with no other support, what else could she do? The differences made via the passage of laws throughout the years to support women’s equality and rights have helped support women to gain their independence and to stand up against patriarchal oppression.

As previously mentioned, in the second act of the play Anne confronts Laramie after he confesses to stealing and tweaking her poem for his own purposes. His younger brother, Bud, becomes mentally ill around this time and accuses Laramie of trying to murder Anne. Bud rants: “Pop had that look when he spoke of the people but blood fell over Laramie’s eyes. I guess it was then I thought: he will murder Anne. I didn’t mean with a knife, with a gun, I meant with death” (Rukeyser 99). This passage seems to allude to the sense of imprisonment women feel at the hand of the patriarchy. Laramie may not have actually murdered Anne, but by suppressing her own desires in favor of his, she lives a life of unfulfillment and longing. Rukeyser’s decision to place Bud’s breakdown right after his older brother confesses to stealing Anne’s poem shows how Laramie is literally destroying pieces of her, by altering and utilizing her words. The quick contrast Bud makes between Laramie and his father, between the son who speaks of the people as tools to attain his dreams and the father who is a leftist activist supporting the needs of the people, creates a very dark image of his character, especially in relation to his suppression of Anne’s desires.

Another prevalent aspect of The Middle of the Air was the strength of Anne’s desire, not only for planes and her future but for her sexuality, as well. Anne admits to her therapist and friend Walter a kind of pansexuality: “I begin to understand love, all kinds of love, forbidden and unforbidden, in marriage, in beautiful lust, in the arabesques of all lovely invention, of all shame, burning for burning, across all barrier—I could love anything now: men, women, statues, trees” (Rukeyser 73). For a play of this time, this revolutionary addition represents the power of women’s desires and the strength of sexuality. Anne continues: “I must find my life: I have chosen to find my life through him” (74). Anne presses on, desiring the independence of her own life and interests, rather than continuing as she has, acting according to Laramie’s desires.

Throughout the play, Anne is also driven by a desire for planes and flight, which is particularly important in regard to her aspirations for her own career as well as a desire of freedom, such as one experiences in flight. In my short story, I use the idea of planes as one of Marie’s means of connecting with Anne, while establishing the idea of a plurality of perspectives through the comparison of what flight means to Marie versus what it had meant to her mother. Even though flight is an important concept for both Rukeyser’s character and mine, the meaning behind its significance differs for each. Unlike Anne who was interested in the act of flying itself, Marie is interested in the creation of flight and in being one of the people who make flight possible for others. Marie thus represents the idea that women are creating the future. A desire for freedom can also be found throughout my story through Marie’s, and other individuals’,  resistance to the objectification, sexualization, and subordination of women in reference to abortion, sexual harassment, and belief in rape victims. The relationship between public and private can also be viewed in these instances, when something occurring in private is perceived differently and therefore morphed by the public. One instance of this is with Marie’s mother, due to how she is perceived publicly as a wife—even though she was raped behind closed doors by Marie’s father, the public perception of her as her husband’s property overshadows this fact. Her own family dismisses her traumatic experience due societal misconceptions of women as sexual possessions to their spouses, where she is disregarded as a victim.

Lexi Rudnitsky, in her article “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics,” discusses the idea of public and private experience, as well as the connection between technology and sexuality, throughout Rukeyser’s work. Rudnitsky describes Rukeyser as one of the first women writers to combine aspects of the public and the private, specifically in how the poet discusses technology in order to draw feminist concepts into politics. This unique position at the time acted to connect the private inequality of women to the public perception of technology as having new possibilities and being capable of changing ways of life. Rudnitsky quotes the philosopher Walter Benjamin to describe Rukeyser as “politicizing art” (240), specifically through her representation of the airplane as a means for a political and sexual awakening. She analyzes The Middle of the Air through the developing relationship between Anne and Laramie in connection with the surrounding climate of politics and technological advancements. Rudnitsky claims: “Rukeyser may have been the first woman poet to take on such themes [of technology]. And she was, more importantly, among the first to invoke the discourse of technology to stake out a protofeminist position” (238). By examining the public’s relationship to planes, especially in the context of war, Rukeyser is able to highlight the importance of flying in several unique ways. This is especially apparent in her depiction of Laramie, who, as Rudnitsky points out, has “taken the two most sacred things in Anne’s life—poetry and flight—and [has] used them toward an end that she finds repugnant” (251); he steals her poetry to push his own fascist, antidemocratic political views and plans. Anne appreciates planes in themselves for their quality of flight and freedom, just as Rukeyser herself always had. The use of technology in her play serves to bring the public conception of planes as a weapon, a technological advancement, or a political tool in conversation with Anne’s private conception of flight itself as being important for the liberation of individuals and of their desires. Rudnitsky writes, “After Laramie’s death, Anne emerges as the archetype of the new pilot-hero: one who uses flight to empower the masses, to stake out new ground for women, and to revolutionize poetry. Thus, her triumph not only reveals her as a woman concerned with the future; it suggests that a woman is the future” (253, original emphasis). Anne who was previously used like a plane by her husband, as a means to an end, now becomes a sort of pilot. This change suggests a revolutionary role for women in the future. It also coincides with a sexual awakening, which positions women not as sexual objects or as planes, but instead as pilots of their own desire.

In order to fight this type of sexist subordination suffered by Anne and countless other women, a change in the laws of a society pushes individuals to fight back in a more direct way. The recognition of both public and private experiences is necessary in order to identify what changes need to be made, as seen through Anne’s private relationship with the male figures in her life and the threat of political disagreement at the time. This need for the recognition of private and public experience is also represented in my story, through Marie’s public and private interactions as well as the consideration of modern laws that have changed the way women react to their subordination under men. Some of these laws include Title IX, Title VII, Breastfeeding State laws, the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, the Maouloud Baby V. State of Maryland 2008 retrial, The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, Provisions of Patient Protect and Affordable care Act [2012], the Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act [2013], The Survivors’ Bill of Right Act [2016], SESTA & FOSTA preventative sex trafficking bills [2018], and the First Step Act [2018]. Although these laws have made progress to provide equal opportunities and justice, they still fall short of protecting all women, such as trans women who face violence and discrimination on a regular basis. Public discussion about and acknowledgment of others’ private experiences are necessary in order to promote progress in a society—by examining our current laws we see how far we have come, as well as how far we have to go to provide protection to all people under the law.  

Throughout many of her works, Rukeyser mentioned the concept of experience and history, specifically what happens when you mix the two. This concern is depicted in Adrienne Rich’s essay “Muriel Rukeyser: Her Vision,” which describes how individuals can change and are changed by their public environment in relation to their private experiences. Importantly, Rich’s essay points to the need for rare perspectives such as Rukeyser’s, which aim to provide a new point of view on culture based on the aforementioned relationship. Rich claims that a reader must experience Rukeyser in order to connect with her, similar to Rukeyser’s own concept of the face-to-face experience. Rukeyser’s unique perspective challenges readers to connect their own private experiences to the text, thus creating the possibility that change can arise. It is for exactly this reason that I chose to submit a short story in response to Muriel Rukeyser. As Rich describes, “From a young age [Rukeyser] seems to have understood herself as living in history—not as a static pattern but as a confluence of dynamic currents, always changing yet faithful to sources, a fluid process that is constantly shaping us and that we have the possibility of shaping” (121). This idea of living in history, with a stress on personal experience, has pushed my creative interaction through my story in order to keep the key concepts from Rukeyser’s works alive in the present. Through this piece, I believe I was able to interact with Rukeyser’s work in a way that brought her ideas of the subordination of women into our present context, with references to the societal changes that have occurred over the years, such as in the scene referencing Planned Parenthood. Rich also states, “In the past quarter century, as many silenced voices—especially women’s voices—began to bear witness, the prescience and breadth of [Rukeyser’s] vision came clearer to me—for it is a peculiarly relevant vision for our lives on this continent now” (126). Rukeyser’s work is supposed to pull a reaction from her readers and provoke women to break their silence.

Throughout The Middle of the Air, Rukeyser provides examples of a feminism-in-the-making through Anne’s subtle rejections of subordination. I aimed to bring her achievement into conversation with my own piece “Another Day in the Life of the Persevering Woman” in order to force readers in the present to interact with the past on the bases of gendered subordination, changes in law, private experiences, and public perceptions. By following Rukeyser’s advice to self-reflect on others’ work and respond to it personally in order to create change, I was able to identify how far women have come in today’s society, as well as how much violence women still face, even with all of the progress we’ve made.

Works Cited

Coontz, Stephanie. “Demystifying the Feminine Mystique.” A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. Basic Books, 2011, pp. 139-65.

Rich, Adrienne. “Muriel Rukeyser: Her Vision.” Arts of the Possible. W.W. Norton, 2001, pp.120-7.

Rudnitsky, Lexi. “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Theory of Flight’ and The Middle of the Air.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 27, no. 2, 2008, pp. 237-57. Project MUSE, doi: muse.jhu.edu/article/266820.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Middle of the Air (Performance script). 1945. Edited by Eric Keenaghan. Unpublished. Original typescript archived in the Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Part I Box 40. Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Perhaps I have become bitter. I have lived in the Palace now for three weeks, and I have begun to learn all of the Princess things. How to walk (apparently, I have been doing it wrong all of these years), how to talk, how to set flower arrangements, how to organize servants, how to organize a banquet, on and on…Still something feels off about all of it. My living here. I know some of the Maids scoff, Madame even found the idea pitiable to begin with. 

A servant becoming a Princess. I have heard them talk.

A Common orphan becoming a Princess.

            Well I am learning, and in the end, I think I will be a very good one. Yet, I know that it is only luck that brought me here. 

My first day in the Palace was not not eventful. That’s a double negative. Rummi, the librarian, says that one negative word placed next to another negative word gives both words a positive meaning. 

            I first arrived and Madame was immediately assigned to me. She is my teacher. On first meeting her, her face told me that she did not believe that I am fit to be a Princess; her mouth told me that she was going to teach me how to be one. 

            Perhaps, I was silly to expect my happily ever after to be a little less stressful. Or, at least a little less lonely. I don’t understand how I could be surrounded by so many people and yet still feel so alone. 

            The Palace is huge. I have never seen a place so big, or so empty. The rooms are vast enough to hold mountains. It is a wonder that people do not get lost in these rooms with their layered curtains and deep carpet. I feel as though it is all pink or red or blue. Everywhere I look, with gold accent. The colors stick to the walls like old porridge and do nothing to fill the empty spaces they hold in. Sometimes I would like to scream in these empty rooms. I would like to hear my voice echo off their walls, peeling wallpaper. Emptying them of loneliness, forcing it out. 

The rooms have few furniture pieces; Madame says it is all the style in Paris. 

            I miss my home, although it was not much of a home, it was more of a home than these empty corridors. There are servants. So many and scattered around the house at such frequency they often seem to blend in with the furniture. At least those that inhabit this house, the Royals, see them as such. 

They are scared to talk to me, and Madame insists it is improper. 

            The first thing Madame did was make me put on the most awful dress. Pink fabric draped over a giant bird cage that she locks around my waist. This I must wear to “look Royal.” I think it just looks foolish. She gives me shoes, the most awful shoes, they pinch my feet. I would have said something, but the Maids helping dress me kept complimenting me. 

“What a pretty Dress.”

“What a gorgeous figure.”

“And, such a pretty little face.”

I do not want to risk hurting their feelings. I feel that it is too close to when I have started this charade to present myself as anything but amiable. I do not want to insult the people who will become my new friends. 

I wear the dress. And the shoes. And after my etiquette lessons I put the shoes in my room and explore the Palace, creaking slightly in my bird cage. Madame catches me before I can go too far and says we must have lunch. Madame says that this is to be my routine every day; until I become more like that of a proper Princess, I am not to leave her sight. My only fear is that it is she who says when I am proper enough. 

It is funny though: I have gone the rest of my day without the shoes. 

⚭

Madame says I talk too loud; Madame says I shouldn’t talk to the Maids; Madame says I must learn to walk with a straight spine and wear a corset; Madame says that I should be visiting the Prince’s Bedroom frequently when he is here. 

Madame reminds me of my Stepmother: they are both utterly Confined by a Cage of expectations I will never fulfill. 

⚭

Rummi is tall. His hair is dark and has gray patches. His eyes are a beautiful green color. His skin is soft and brown. His clothes remind me of my friends in the village, yet they are made out of much finer fabrics.
            Rummi works in the Library and is a man of many contradictions. That is what he says about himself; I just say that he is my friend. 

He gives me the most wonderful books to read. Books about grain prices and how roads are made. He gives me books full of numbers and has started to teach me how to do math. His favorite are the poetry books, he has even added a few of his own to the Palace collection– without permission from the court, of course. So that will just be our secret.

Rummi makes this Palace seem smaller than it was before. 

We talk for hours after my lessons and I help him in the library. I believe he is a better teacher to me than Madame is. He tells me about the history of the Royal family. Who hates whom, and who won’t talk to whomever else. He has worked as the Royal librarian for thirty-three years, and he has taught almost all of the current family to read. Including Eric.  

It is Rummi who says I ought to keep patience; it is Rummi who assures me that these people will be my friends, eventually. 

⚭

            Madame is a very fine talker. It suits someone of her stature. Sometimes, I look at her and see that she could almost be pretty, if her face wasn’t so tightly pulled back into her bun of hair. Her hair has gone almost entirely silver except for a few stubborn dark spots that she seems most embarrassed by. Her skin is pale as winter snow, and wrinkled, aged, withering. I do not think that any Princess brought as the Prince’s bride would have suited Madame, no one so young could ever impress her. I am aware that I am young and naïve. 

            Curiously, she has embraced this character of hers, and refuses the thought that she is not all bad. I ask her about her husband, if she has any children. She seems reluctant to answer, as though she is horrified by such a thought. Perhaps the issue is not with my question but with sharing intimate details about herself with someone like me. 

⚭

            The garden is beautiful here. There are flowers of every kind. After lessons with Madame I have twenty minutes of free time when I may wander as I please. Often, I will go sit under the trees; it is Spring and there are all sorts of beautiful blossoms hanging from the branches. Some branches are so low they brush my head as I walk under them. Later, a brush against my head will cause small pink or white or purple petals to fall from the branches and rain on me. This thought makes me excited for the future, maybe it will be tolerable.

            When Eric is here, I will ask him to walk with me in the garden. I will ask him if our future will be tolerable. I will use my naivety to create conversation. 

On the way back to my room, I spotted a mouse. I had not talked to one in so long, I caught it by its tail and hid it behind my book to bring it back to my room with me. Madame does not seem to like mice, and therefore she must not know that I am communicating with one.

            I made the mouse a small nest out of a match box and cotton and placed it in it, so that she could be comfortable. I went through all the formalities of introductions. I told her that I would not call in the cat on her, but for some reason, she would not respond. 

            I took out one of the leftover tunics I had brought with me from home and tried to put it on her, but she bit my thumb and jumped off my dresser. I cannot figure out why. She scampered out my door and I have not seen her since. 

⚭

            Madame introduced me to a new Maid today, she is to replace a girl discharged due to a pregnancy. I curtsied during the introductions, but she looked at me strangely. 

            All today she avoided my eyes whenever we were in the same room together. I liked the other better, at least she didn’t make me feel so odd. Like I am missing something.

            Eric is back today. I have organized a banquet in his honor tonight, it is my duty as a Princess. It will be so much fun. There will be dancing, and food. So. Much. Food. At the first banquet I attended here there was so much food that I did not know how to control myself. I’m afraid I ate everything I could, Eric was terribly embarrassed at my behavior. 

            I have wheedled Madame to invite the common people as well, my friends from town. I know it will be just wonderful. Eric and I will dance and then walk in the garden under the stars.

⚭

            The Banquet was not fantastic. 

            Madame said she made a mistake in mailing the invitations to all of my friends and none of them received them. 

After dinner, all Eric wanted to do was go to bed. He insisted that I go with him. I know that I am his wife and that I must perform certain duties, however nobody ever conveyed exactly what those were. If they had, I would have rethought the idea of Marriage. The first time I ever had to, on the Honeymoon, I was positively frightened. I don’t think the world has ever thought about how odd it is that they tell us half our life that we should never do something and then the other half that we must. 

I tried to convince Eric to walk with me, he would not budge. He leaves in three days again. Perhaps he will walk with me before that. 

⚭

            Today, I asked the new Maid, she has still not told me her name, why she avoids me like I am Crazy. She insisted that she does not avoid me. I told her she does, whenever I enter a room she exits. She tells me that I am a Princess and that a Maid is not suitable to be in the same room with a Princess. I tell her that that is utter nonsense and from now on she and I are to be thought of as on the same level; I used to be a Maid, too. 

            That is when Madame came in and told her to get back to work. I have a feeling I know why she feels that she must avoid me.

⚭

            Rummi asked me where I was from today. We were examining maps and he showed me where he was from, across the ocean. I told him that I am from the town. An old broken-down manor. He did not seem phased by this, however I felt extremely uncomfortable at the thought of my origins in a way that I never have before. He noticed that I was uncomfortable; he is terribly empathetic, and I can never hide a feeling from him. Guessing my reason for feeling so, he told me that it was normal. That no Commoner has ever felt comfortable in the Palace. 

            Rummi is positive things will turn around soon: Either I will change, or the Palace will. 

⚭

 I am no longer allowed to converse with mice, instead I am watched as though I am a bird in a Cage, night and day.

I wish I was in a Zoo instead. There, at least, people might want to see me fly. 

Madame caught me speaking to a mouse the other day. She saw it and screamed. The guard caught it, and no amount of tears convinced him to release the poor thing. Poor Mouse.  

Madame says that I am Crazy and must stop talking to mice, and animals, and whatnot. She told me that I am no longer lonely, and if I keep it up, they would have to investigate if there is something seriously wrong with me. “Mice don’t talk.” Madame says that if I continue people will start to call me Crazy. 

I don’t know how to explain that everything within me feels alone, so terribly small. I don’t know how to explain that Mice do talk if you listen, and that they are fantastic listeners. They are better listeners than anyone in the Palace. 

I don’t know how to explain that there is something crawling up the inside of my throat and it causes tears every time I am forced to speak as a Princess and not allowed to speak as me. And that it cuts deeper every time I sacrifice another part of my personality to fit my role. I don’t know how to explain this to Madame, and I don’t think she would listen. She was out the door before I could start sobbing. And tears are all that came. 

I was Confined to my room due to a stomachache. 

I feel that I am alone all the world; there is enough pain in my throat to share with all the Kingdom. I do not know how much longer I can do this. 

⚭

            “Is there something wrong with her?”

            “Crazy.”

I overheard one of the Maids talking to another. Madame is right, I should make it a mission to not overhear others’ conversations. 

I have a feeling that I have come to the world slowly. It’s not that I grew up dumb, or that I was overly sheltered or underly so, but for some reason I think that the world didn’t take to me until very recently. I can think of no other reason as to why I feel so incredibly out of my depth in these conditions, as though I am drowning. 

 I suppose at some point I had to learn that not all Princes are charming and that talking to mice is for lonely people. If you feel the need to talk to somebody, you should talk to a Maid who can keep her mouth closed, not to mice. That is what Madame says. 

I look around the dinner table and wonder: Who are we outside of this? The rules are so strict here. You cannot breathe without following a royal code, all laid out for me by Madame. Your stomach must not protrude too much from beneath your breasts. You are only allowed one half second to exhale; any longer and it will become a sigh which is a social statement, and social statements are very rarely looked upon as polite. 

            I wonder the most about Eric, he is a very good husband, from what I have been told, and a very good Prince, as far as my unstudied eye can tell. He is always going off on Princely quests and the common people love him. Yet, he is so stiff. 

Not a day goes by when his spine is not as straight or taut as the petrified tree in my mother’s garden at home. When he comes home, he is tired and doesn’t wish to see me. It seems that the only place he can be himself is the bathtub.

 I wonder who he would have been if he had been allowed the freedom to explore himself as a young boy. Who he could’ve been if he hadn’t been born into the shoe of Princedom. If he had not been born Royal.

I think he would have been a sailor. He loves the sea; it is almost all he ever talks about. He has a sweet romance with the sea that grew under Confined land locked conditions. He never even saw the sea until he was sixteen years old. That is what Rummi tells me. 

What should I know what he sees, though? I have not seen him for well over eighteen days. 

⚭

            Today Rummi gave me a book about a Princess and a Beast. I did not like it. I did not think it was realistic. 

            Rummi says that I am merely going through growing pains, and everything will fall into place in time. I asked him how long it took him to adjust, but he didn’t answer me. He just looked away and began to talk about birds.

I don’t want to wait until I am adjusted. 

⚭

            I bled today. I have bled consistently every month since I was 12. I am to understand that it is normal, as I have cleaned plenty of bloody rags from my Stepmother and Sisters. I asked Madame if I may have a rag for the blood. She looked horrified that any such thing should come out of my mouth. 

The Maids around me began to comfort me immediately. They asked if I was terribly upset and if the Prince knew yet. I confessed that I didn’t understand why I would be upset, and they seemed to find that terribly funny. They thought my ignorance was very humorous. They told me that I bled because I was not pregnant. I did not ask why this was important, I was not trying to be humorous. 

            After dinner I went immediately to my room, my stomach hurt so and I have never had the pleasure of a comfortable bed to lie on before.

            It looks different on silk than on the wool I once had. It is deep and often in small clumps. The silk does not absorb so much, instead letting it ride on the surface, if you are not careful it could all slide off. 

On the yellow silk it is almost as though it could be smooth, the potential is there. All one must do is smooth it out. As though you could wash it enough you may be able to smooth it out. Make it silky, and flow. Red and yellow have never looked so beautiful, I must confess. 

            Madame came to me then, she entered without introduction as always. Some days I wonder if there has not been some mix up, that she is the true Princess after all and I am just a stand in. A project to stave off her boredom.

She sits me on the couch and takes the rag from my hand, wrapping it up carefully so that she is not touching my blood, too dark and Common for her. She tells me that I am never to ask for such a thing as a rag in public again. If I need one, I may write a note to her or a Maid and hand it to them discreetly. 

She tells me that she thinks I have not quite understood my role here yet. That as a Princess and a Wife it is my job to create heirs. That I should not let myself bleed again until I have had many children. I ask her, Why? 

She tells me that things are different now. 

She tells me that if I am not to embrace this role fully there is no way I could ever be a proper Princess or Wife to Eric. 

She tells me that I am lucky to be here, in a Palace. When I started off sleeping next to an old fireplace in a dusty, broken-down, cindery old house. She does not think I am Committed enough to be here. 

She tells me that I ought to be doing my best to make this work, as I am so lucky to be a part of the Royal family since I came from such a Common background. 

She stands, leaving my rag on the couch next to where she was sitting. I seem to not be able to look at anything else. It seems to me that the only real thing in the world is that yellow silk, and the blood on it. 

“It is also possible to send you back to your humble home, if it is seen as the best fit for the Palace as a whole. I’m sure the arrangements can be made for your Marriage to be dissolved if this is too much for you, Cinderella.”

She looks at me as though I am sickly, as though I am Crazy. She is expecting an answer, she is expecting me to beg to go home. She looks at me as though I am a stupid Commoner. 

I do the only thing I feel I can do, after taking so much from Madame. I rise, grabbing my rag, I look her in the eyes and hold out my rag to her.
            “Give this to the Maid on your way out, Madame. Goodnight.”

I turn from her and cross to my dresser, undoing my hair. I panic at the silence, but then I hear Madame exit. 

My Conviction has been made clear.

A critical self-reflection on “The ‘C’ Word”

The feeling of shame is present in everybody’s life, it has developed as an intrinsic part of our society’s system of control, a method to control the behavior of those who live in it. Whoever is in control of mainstream society controls what is perceived as shameful. For instance, in our modern day we consider periods, sex, homosexuality, to all have varying levels of shame attached to them.

 Stories are a way to examine the topic of shame, as they can bring up uncomfortable issues in manageable ways and are easier to discuss without causing people to take them too personally. Muriel Rukeyser was an author who could bring up touchy issues in a way that does not end with the alienation of the reader. Striking a balance of not causing feelings of shame yet addressing ‘shameful’ topics, Rukeyser’s style brings up these topics while remaining “emotionally neutral” (Wallenstein 53). In The Orgy (1965), Rukeyser visits County Kerry, Ireland on a research mission to observe the Puck festival on behalf of Paul Rotha, a filmmaker. She documents the visit with a stream of consciousness story, tinged with shame but ending with self-empowerment. Rukeyser begins by documenting her own shame and the shame of the native Irish people who accompany her on her three-day journey through Puck Fair.

Throughout the book, it is pointed out by those around her that Rukeyser plays the role of the ignorant American. In fact, she documents the word “ignorant” as a way she labels herself. Rukeyser initially wants to take advantage of being labeled “ignorant”: “I’d like to use my ignorance,” she writes (13). However, she does feel and react to the shame present in such a statement, as is evidence by her refusal to resemble a tourist. Rukeyser refuses to carry a camera, “I am not going to be an American woman carrying a camera” (7). She instead opts for a small notebook to record her experience.

As if to relay this feeling through an image, Rukeyser describes the crowd on Gathering Day, all staring in awe at the Puck Queen, who is crowning the great Goat. Well, everyone is focused on the main event “but one woman whose face was fastened sideways, staring across all the faces at someone with a camera” (43). This image breaks up the sanctity of what was otherwise described. Rukeyser views this brash documentation by another person, someone wielding a camera, as a dishonor to the festival and people who inhabit County Kerry. The fact that this other person is the typical sort of American tourist only adds to the shame she feels about being from such a culture. 

Her new Irish friends also add to this feeling of alienation that leads Rukeyser to take on the role of the passive narrator. Even what she calls the bathroom (“What is the matter with Americans, that they can’t say toilet?”) is picked apart by the locals she has aligned herself with (12). However, this aggression towards Rukeyser about her American nationality also shows the locals’ own weaknesses, since they are reluctant to invite Rukeyser into their festival. “I hate visitors to see it,” they tell her (13). And they seem to question Rukeyser’s motivations as a way to keep her away from the festivities because they are ashamed of their own culture as well. 

A good example of this hidden hostility: Rukeyser’s new friend Nicholas asks twice if Rukeyser would not come back to Glenbeigh with them at the end of the first night. “‘Surely not,’ he said, and the crowd for a moment pushed him back and away from me,” she remembers (47). Nicholas’s refusal to believe that she would like to stay at the festival longer created not only an emotional divide between them—later Rukeyser thinks to herself, “What an ass” (48)—but also, quite literally, a physical one. 

It is not until the third day of the festival, Scattering Day, and the final pages of The Orgy that Rukeyser first documents somebody directly addressing her by her name. “Muriel! Just a word…” (129). This change, writing herself by name, is indicative of the change in mood in the final pages of the book. As Rukeyser finds her own self-empowerment, she answers a question she has been pondering all along: Will she really be the one to bring a documentary camera to this transformative festival? Her answer is no, and with this Rukeyser begins to speak, making a joke about the usual American way. “Do it the—how shall I say?—the American way. Wish for it clear of rain and cold, no sheep, no petrol drums—wish for an air-conditioned tunnel” (132). She is able to laugh about the stereotypes associated with her nationality, and thus is able to continue her journey home proud of who she is, as an individual, and free of shame. 

In 1950, over ten years before The Orgy was published, the Walt Disney Studios was in its golden age and produced Cinderella. In modern America, most people know the story of Cinderella and have consumed some version of it. As a fairytale, “Cinderella” is in the public domain, both in terms of its copyright and in the sense that, once a fairytale has been accepted by a society, individuals start to feel personal ownership of the story. That is why there are hundreds of movies all with the same title, Cinderella, yet you could not say that all of these movies tell the same version of the story. 

 I have chosen Disney’s 1950 Cinderella, and the 2002 continuation Cinderella II to frame my creative response to The Orgy because it is a well-known fairytale. Although I was inspired by Rukeyser’s “emotionally neutral” writing style, I also wanted to create a story that was outright provocative, by drawing attention to shame and wrongdoings happening in the story itself. Since everyone can feel like they have ‘ownership’ over a fairytale, I thought that the most provocative way to get a response from readers would be to take a beloved fairytale and give it a title like “The ‘C’ Word,” and then use a Disney-style Princess to confront uncomfortable and shameful issues. I wanted to mimic the emotional response that Rukeyser often elicited and received, but I would be more direct. 

The movie Cinderella was released by Disney in post-World War II America and laid the foundation for Cinderella II, released in 2002. Cinderella provides a reflection of changes in American culture, especially in the image of American women. The world had begun to shift away from the steadfastness shown by WWII-era icons like Rosie the Riveter and moved towards a more frivolous ideal. As Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell has argued, this reflects cultural changes during the postwar moment. Much like many of Disney’s other movies, its version of the Cinderella story (Cinderella and Cinderella II) does not cover controversial issues in an outright way. Instead, it creates a world that is decidedly neutral, with no real “evil” present, and one where the character of Cinderella is not given any choice about her identity. 

The Orgy was published later, in a time that was tumultuous for the American Left. Student groups were becoming more popular, and the Civil Rights movement was well underway (Brick and Phelps 88-121). Rukeyser would have been aware of both the Civil Rights movement and the corresponding rise of 2nd wave Feminism happening at the time, and would have known these movements were potential audiences for her work. The Orgy covers many interesting and complex issues that also become controversial, and deal with the political/personal dynamic. The time in which Rukeyser was writing was a time when many people were just beginning to link the personal and political; and many still would have been wary of how activists like Rukeyser fused them together almost seamlessly (Brick and Phelps 118).

 Rukeyser’s writing style believes in the inherent connection of the personal to the political. Today we accept this link as an intrinsic fact, and we have become more accepting of previously taboo subjects; however, there are still topics that remain shameful. Shame is likely never to go away completely. Because shame functions as a way to control people’s behavior, there will never be a society that does not some forms of shame to police its values. We all experience variations of shame and embarrassment every day, and this is what will make Rukeyser’s The Orgy relevant far past its time. At its core, it is a story about finding and coming to terms with personal identity, both despite and through feeling ashamed.

So, I ask why do we let Cinderella off so easy? If she is going on her own journey of personal identity after she marries the Prince, why is it not just as messy and shame filled as Rukeyser’s own? The answer is that Cinderella’s journey probably is. We have just been consuming a sanitized version of this fairytale story. If Rukeyser had indeed taken photos on her journey to Puck Fair, that is what we would have seen as well with her story, a sanitized version that removes her shame. It is when we start to feel the story instead of just seeing it when the real transformation happens. 

In my version of the fairytale, inspired by Rukeyser’s story and relying on the events of Cinderella II the sequel to Disney’s Cinderella, Cinderella has been thrown into a strange environment with new customs and nobody she knows. She is in the midst of culture shock while trying to scramble to become the Princess and Wife that she is expected to be, a position she has never been prepared for in her life. My heroine is a Commoner wearing a Royal’s clothes, coming from an environment that drove her to the point of talking to mice and birds, as they were the only company she was allowed to keep. She has never had the luxury of having to think about her personal identity before, it has always been assumed of her. It is the difference between telling someone “You are a Maid” and instead asking them “Would you like to be a Princess?” 

In the end, Cinderella has the chance to decide what her identity is. Maybe we see this in the movie as well, but the experience of watching something happen, passively, versus actively engaging with and feeling the story is the difference between mindless entertainment and transformation. Fairytales are inherently personal, everyone has their own version of the story of “Cinderella”in their heads already, each tinged with their own personal perspective. Every fairytale, fable, and myth we are exposed to helps make us who we are. By making the story more about the personal and private experience of the character of Cinderella, I have created a world where the building blocks are already familiar. I have created a world where Cinderella can undergo a transformation, and so can the reader. Like what Rukeyser experiences at Puck Fair, such experience can bring us “Out of my old shame—” and “At last gave me / My woman’s name” (Orgy 135).

Works Cited

Brick, Howard, and Christopher Phelps. “A New Left, 1960-1964.” Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 88–121.

Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly. “Cinderella: The Ultimate (Postwar) Makeover Story.” The Atlantic, 9 Mar. 2015. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/03/cinderella-the-ultimate  postwar-makeover-story/387229/

Cinderella. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, Walt Disney Productions, 1950.

Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. Directed by John Kafka and Darrell Rooney, Walt Disney Company, 2002.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation. 1965. Paris Press, 1997.

Wallenstein, Barry. “Muriel Rukeyser and the Politics of Poetry.” Margins, nos. 24-26, 1975, pp. 52+. Independent Voices.

To cite this creative and critical essay in MLA 8th edition: Buczeksmith, Sam. “The ‘C’ Word.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/09/09/sam-buczeksmith-the-c-word/

I do and I do.
Life and this under-war.
Deep under protest, make.
For we are makers more. 

—Muriel Rukeyser, “Breaking Open” (Collected Poems 527)

How should one approach Muriel Rukeyser’s vast body of work and multifaceted life? My first inclination is through her role as poet,one of the few identity categories she embraced, uncritically, alongside those of “American,” “woman,” and, after the birth of her son in 1947, “mother.” But given pervasive misconceptions about poetry’s apolitical or antipolitical nature, and given the variety of forms Rukeyser explored over her long career, even that identity seems too limiting. Other forms of identificatory nomenclature that seem suitable—bisexual or lesbian or pansexual, Jew, feminist—actually are contestable.¹

Rukeyser’s own disidentification with political labels and sociological identity categories was more than reactionary antinomianism. Instead, her attitude was symptomatic of her own rejection of anything that might box her in, thereby cutting her off from other segments of humanity and diminishing her potential for future growth and empowerment, on her own terms. Critic Shira Wolosky, when examining Jewishness in Rukeyser’s work, insightfully notes that the poet’s work engages “mutual figuration,” whereby her “different identifications become figures for each other, standing for and also with or against each other” (202). Consequently, rather than write a poetry with a “closed, iconic, traditional lyric ‘I’” that suggests a unified ego, “Rukeyser’s selfhood is instead enacted as a multiple negotiation among a variety of mutually representative, contentious, constitutive parts of the self, each situated in concrete social, political histories” (Wolosky 203). So, perhaps a role like public intellectual, rather than any fixed identity, might be more applicable for studying Rukeyser. Teacher and educator, definitely fit. When developing a recent undergraduate course at the University of Albany, SUNY, devoted solely to Rukeyser’s life and career, I thought that activist made the most sense, at least for me.

Of course, this categorization is problematic, too. Even while a student at Vassar College, when she might be called a radical without controversy, Rukeyser found herself at odds with the American left’s partisan politics and ideologies. Very often, her marginalization outside, sometimes even exclusion from, organized radicalism was a product of the sexism that afflicted both American leftism and its literary arms. Rukeyser’s refusal to toe any party line remained a constant throughout her life, even as the nature of leftism evolved and she moved along its spectrum. At any given time, she was prone to adopt seemingly conflicting views. Much like Walt Whitman, Rukeyser was unapologetic about any self-contradiction. Her antifascism during the Second World War, for instance, caused her to enter into service producing propaganda for the federal government, the same government of which she had been critical during her student years, just a decade earlier. Her brief employment by the Office of War Information initiated the start of a particularly harsh period of vitriolic attacks by other activists and activist-poets that continued into the postwar years.²Her adversaries usually interpreted her tendency to seem at odds with herself or her previous positions as merely self-serving wishy-washiness. Rukeyser, in contrast, regarded it as a willingness to learn. First and foremost, she was a pragmatist, in William James’s sense of a flexible, experimental application of various practical measures for realizing philosophical ideals. Catherine Gander has wonderfully explored how Rukeyser’s adoption of a pragmatist emphasis on flexibility and adaptability informed her “commitment to the necessity of dynamic relation in an aesthetics of human meaning-making” (1217). Such a commitment to dynamism extended beyond the aesthetic realm, into the political. When it came to activism, for Rukeyser the most expeditious means of producing the most desired result, the realization and defense of socialist democratic first principles, were the best political means.

During the Cold War, like many other American artists who also were leftists, Rukeyser continued to pursue her idealist vision through her work. Activism did not fall entirely out of the picture, but she understood full well just how vulnerable she was. So, the pragmatic—different from “pragmatist”—dimensions of political praxis took a backseat to her writing. She was surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the 1950s, her editor at the major trade house Little Brown fell victim to an anticommunist character assassination, a major factor in why three of Rukeyser’s books in her four-book deal with that house never came to fruition. While a lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College, affluent Westchester County’s local anticommunist brigade specifically targeted her for supposedly corrupting young women. Luckily, that establishment’s president and board of trustees defended her.³During the politically tense period of the 1950s, Rukeyser worked assiduously in many different media—poetry, biography, translation, fiction, film, television, drama, children’s literature, ghostwriting for others. In her preface to Out of Silence, an edition of Rukeyser’s selected poems, Kate Daniels problematically misrepresents this decade as unproductive for the writer. Supposedly, the “labor-, time-, and energy-intensive project of childrearing” led to “the dramatic and immediate decrease in her literary production” (Daniels xiii). In actuality, though, Rukeyser was incredibly and unimaginably productive. She still wrote and published a lot of poetry, but most of her work from this period actually was in other forms, usually ones with more promise of remuneration. After all, she was supporting a child on her own. Though she needed the paycheck, Rukeyser still took risks with her cultural output during the 1950s. Much of what she did create was politically inflammatory, and she drew fire from hostile parties. Consequently, much of her work was suppressed by editors and publishers, sometimes because she was a queer woman and a leftist. A great deal of this material still hasn’t seen the light of day. At least not yet.

In the final decades of her life, the New Left had risen to prominence. Many belonging to this younger generation of revolutionaries and radicals embraced a kind of cultural leftism that seemed an outgrowth of and conversant with Rukeyser’s own longtime ideas. Activists and writers associated with women’s liberation and gay and lesbian liberation would turn to her as a foremother. But she was slow in acknowledging the strengths of their political positions. She warmed up to the feminist movement late. Even then she did so with reservations, despite her fierce defense of women’s autonomy and her sex positivity—which only became more pronounced with age. She greeted queer politics after Stonewall with even more suspicion. It is rumored that in 1978, nearly a decade after the start of gay and lesbian liberation, Rukeyser had accepted an invitation to join a lesbian reading at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference but had to cancel because of illness (Bulkin 884). Even if that rumored invitation and acceptance were confirmed (I myself haven’t yet found definitive proof), would she have claimed allegiance with the movement then? If her expressed ambivalence about women’s liberation in her address to the MLA’s Radical Caucus a few years earlier is any indication, when she sarcastically noted that her breasts were too big for bra-burning, she probably would not have (Rukeyser, Untitled address).

Rukeyser would be embraced by the antiwar movement of the late 1960s and the amnesty movement of the early 1970s. The presumption that she easily adopted a personal philosophy of “pacifism” must be qualified, though. In 1972, she was arrested for participating in a die-in in the hallway directly outside the US Senate’s chamber, as part of a protest organized by the antiwar organization Redress. For years afterward, she peppered notebooks and miscellaneous slips of paper with what became almost a mantra, about how her desire to be nonviolent resulted in a struggle because she was, as she openly admitted, a violent woman. “Waking This Morning,” the extraordinary opening poem of her volume Breaking Open (1973), begins with this theme: “Waking this morning, / a violent woman in the violent day, / Laughing.” Rukeyser goes on to trace her efforts to write “my touch poems: / […] to find you entire / alive moving among the anti-touch people.” The prospect of making that work moves her toward her final declaration, a valediction to her reader:

today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day. (Collected Poems 471)

Rukeyser’s verb “try” both relieves and unsettles me, for it amounts to her casual admission of an uncomfortable condition I feel so strongly, too. Unlike her, though, I often see my temper and all other manifestations of my violent character as personal flaws. Rukeyser is not embarrassed by her innate violence, though. She knows that in her world, as in ours, the possibility of being nonviolent is, to be blunt (and to not suppress the frequent verbal manifestations of this flaw of mine), fucking impossible. The idea that we can will even our own nonviolence, unproblematically and without incident, is laughable. Indeed, that’s why Rukeyser laughs at the poem’s start. It’s an image that brings to mind the feminist laugh of Hélène Cixous’s medusa, a near-contemporary Rukeyser herself probably would not have known. The poem’s world-shattering, possibly self-derisive guffaw comes from the same woman who recently had gone on an unofficial peace mission to Vietnam with a Senator’s wife (Jane Hart) and another poet (Denise Levertov). It emanates from the same woman who, since the Second World War, often wrote about what she called her “wish” for peace. We can wish for peace, but that doesn’t mean we are pacifists. Purist idealism will get us nowhere and nothing in this violent world we cannot extricate ourselves from. But we can keep trying to free ourselves, to make the wish real. There’s her pragmatism again, in her vision of the need for our unending experimentation with resistance to our own internalization of the war-state’s and its society’s violence. Making, creating, doing. These are the only means by which we’ll overcome ourselves. Or, as Rukeyser writes in the title poem of Breaking Open, which I cite in my epigraph, “I do and I do. / Life and this under-war” (Collected Poems 527).

When I developed my course on Muriel Rukeyser, I knew I wanted to present her to my students as this kind of woman, this kind of activist, one who is impossible to heroize but whose example begs to be admired. She was a political poet not in spite of her contradictions and difficulties and complexities, but instead because of them. Indeed, Rukeyser ought to serve as a model—not a cautionary tale—for those of us who now fancy ourselves leftist or progressive writers and students of the literary arts. For my course to do justice to all of her, I could not be uncritical, and my criticisms had to be transparent. Yet, I also had to cultivate my students’ strong admiration, tempered by their own healthy criticisms of her. I would guide my students through her work, in its various forms: documentarian poetry, lyric, essays and reviews, literary nonfiction, fiction, drama, film, children’s books, and biography. To augment the readily available body of Rukeyser’s poetry and her poetics treatise The Life of Poetry (1949), I would draw on my years of archival work, to bring to my students Rukeyser’s previously published journalism, essays, book reviews, and scripts, most of which are long out-of-print. I would approach Bill Rukeyser, the poet’s son and literary executor, about the prospect of teaching an edited and annotated version of his mother’s masterful, as-yet-unpublished antifascist verse-play The Middle of the Air (1944-1945). Alongside the “Many Keys” essay that I had only recently recovered, it would be the sole piece of still unpublished or suppressed work that my students would read. But there could have been so many other possibilities—plays, pieces of uncompleted biographies, essays, reviews, collaborations—still left unpublished and awaiting discovery by a new generation of readers! We would read these selections of Rukeyser’s multivalent output against the backdrop of the evolving history of US radical political culture. We would trace the evolution of her ideas and poetics, and we would test them against various leftist principles and movements during her lifetime and against our own senses of social justice today.

My course was offered in Fall 2019 as a 300-level elective, cross-listed in both English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Although it was before the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has cast our lives into chaos as well as has called into question all certainties about how activism can be done (though the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests assure as that we assembly is still possible, and consequential), we were still in a pretty chaotic space at that time. The seeming eternity of the Trump Presidential administration’s regime of malfeasance, mismanagement, and hatred—as well as, more positively, the #MeToo movement and earlier #BlackLivesMatter resistance—often were points of reference both for my thinking about Rukeyser and for my students’ processing of the American sociopolitical climate during her lifetime. I called my course “The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser,” for she had many lives and lived through many periods, not just one. Approximately thirty students enrolled for the course. Only one even knew who Rukeyser was before we began; she had taken my modernist poetry course the semester before, where we had studied The Book of the Dead (1938). For everyone else, Rukeyser was an unknown quantity. Most students were taking the class because it fulfilled some requirement or other, some because they were curious about women’s literature, generally, and thought they would get a straightforward introduction to feminist literature. I had warned everyone from the outset: Rukeyser was a woman of many contradictions but also of deep convictions. By semester’s end, you’ll either love her or you’ll hate her. Thankfully, many—of course, not all—loved her.

The following portfolio models the work by five of those undergraduates who came to love Muriel Rukeyser because they devoted an entire course from their respective student careers to her. Or, perhaps better put, they are five students who loved at least one facet of her life and work. The work published here consists of revised versions of these students’ final projects for our class. They had two options for designing their projects. The first was to develop a critical essay, based on a rather open prompt and incorporating secondary sources that had been assigned as required or recommended reading. The alternative was to develop a creative project of their own, accompanied by a similarly researched but shorter critical self-reflection essay. Whether scholarly or creative, each option for this assignment amounted to a means of encouraging the students to make critical responses to Rukeyser’s work.

Responsiveness was the combined ethico-political and aesthetic core of Rukeyser’s literary work and sociopolitical convictions. One of her great political poetic sequences “Searching / Not Searching,” also from the aforementioned volume Breaking Open, is prefaced with a serious witticism from Rukeyser’s acquaintance and another poet to whom I’m committed, Robert Duncan. “Responsibility is to use the power to respond,” she quotes him as having said (Collected Poems 480). She had been writing about such “power to respond” for decades, most pointedly in her book-length treatise The Life of Poetry (1949). There, Rukeyser theorizes about all manner of responses, including a formulation I’m fond of quoting: “a poem invites a total response” (Life of Poetry 11). That response “is reached through the emotions” (11). Emotions are a complex matter for Rukeyser; suffice it to say here that they are the primary means for accessing one’s self. The old chestnut Know thyself was a misbegotten idea for her, as well as for Duncan, two writers deeply invested in the artist’s unconscious life. If knowing oneself is out of the question, then the most one can do is Work on thyself. Poetry, or any art, calls upon us, readers and writers alike, to do exactly that. “The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form,” Rukeyser writes toward the end of The Life of Poetry (181). “That this form has to do with the relationships of sounds, rhythms, imaginative beliefs does not isolate the process from any other creation. A total imaginative response is involved, and the first gestures of offering—even if the offering is never completed, and indeed even if the poem falls short” (181). When I asked my students at the end of the semester to respond to Rukeyser, I implicitly was asking each to make such a total imaginative response. I was asking them to work on themselves, to come to some sense of their individual and personal commitments to some principles or ideals of social justice, while they worked through, and responded to, Rukeyser’s work…which itself is the trace of her own process of working on herself. Unlike those who prize scholarship’s rationalism because of its intellectualist cultural capital, I value critical essays for being creative affairs, reflexive acts of self-creation. And as a poet, I also know that a creative project is always its own kind of critical essay, using the word essay in the sense of its French root, as signifying an adventure, a process, a trial or testing of oneself.

The students featured in this portfolio volunteered not only to share their work with you, the reader, but also to live longer with their initial projects. They have revised and expanded and transformed their writing beyond what they originally produced for our course. Thus, their work exemplifies what is possible when one engages and then reengages Rukeyser with one’s whole self to her precedent, in order to produce a total imaginative response. It’s significant that the five contributors who wanted to share their work with you identify as women. Gender is important here, and figures prominently in how they engaged with and responded to Rukeyser. But many other factors are important, too: Rukeyser’s Jewishness, her anti-imperialism and lifelong protest of white supremacy, her resolute faith in universal equity and humanity, her caring and empathy, her sex positivity, her desire for social transformation.

Two of the contributors have developed academic critical essays. Both of these essays are impressive undertakings, which do not just perform dry close readings of Rukeyser’s work. Instead, they are conceptual engagements with the poet’s core ideas about social justice and citizens’ empowerment, as read in her prose and in her poetry. Modina Jackson reads the poem “Breaking Open” (1973) in light of Rukeyser’s activism during the Vietnam Conflict. Chloe Ross meditates on how Rukeyser’s brand of Cold War-era feminism in “Many Keys” (1957, pub. 2018), a lost essay about women’s writing, offers a model for feminist collectivity predating second-wave liberal feminism of Betty Friedan that is necessary for us to reclaim today to reimagine the terms of solidarity and coalition, beyond identity politics.

The portfolio’s other contributors opted to respond to Rukeyser through different creative avenues. Sam Buczeksmith was inspired by Rukeyser’s challenge of the culture of shame in Puck Fair (1965), a book about an Irish centuries-old fertility celebration of the same name. In response, she wrote a short fiction updating the Cinderella fairytale to tackle how shame interferes with women’s autonomy and sexual freedom. Lily Pratt also has written a short fiction, a diaristic account by a young woman, imagined as the daughter of Anne, Rukeyser’s protagonist from the unpublished play The Middle of the Air (1944-1945), which the poet’s literary estate generously allowed me to share with my students. Lily’s narrator suffers the indignities and violence of a patriarchal, sexist culture, and we witness her consciousness being reshaped by those experiences and the public and activist discourse of our #MeToo moment. Vered Ornstein also was impressed by Rukeyser’s wartime play. However, she adopted The Middle of the Air’s dramatic form, not its content or themes, to create a speculative playlet that interrogates Rukeyser’s cultural Jewishness and her wartime stance in relation to Zionism. Vered comes to understand how the Holocaust prompted extraordinary responses from many American and European Jews about the question of Palestine, but she sees the poet’s wartime position as exposing the limits of Rukeyser’s anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist politics, as evinced in early poems like “The Blood Is Justified” (1935).

I will withstand the temptation to say more about these great total imaginative responses to Rukeyser. Each author’s work should speak for itself. Only then can these students introduce themselves to you as the strong, vibrant, and fiercely committed intellectuals and writers they are. Just as Rukeyser’s own literature attests to her process of self-construction and the many lives she had led, these authors’ writings bear the traces of the work they have done on themselves while making their total responses to this formidable predecessor activist and poet.

Works Cited

Bergman, David. “Ajanta and the Rukeyser Imbroglio.” American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 3, 2010, pp. 553-83. Project Muse.

Berkinow, Louise, editor. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552-1950. Vintage, 1974.

Brock, James. “The Perils of a ‘Poster Girl’: Muriel Rukeyser, Partisan Review, and Wake Island.” “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?” The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman. St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 254-63.

Bulkin, Elly. “‘A Whole New Poetry Beginning Here’: Teaching Lesbian Poetry.” College English, vol. 40, No. 8, 1979, pp. 874-88. JSTOR.

Daniels, Kate. “Preface: ‘In Order to Feel.’” Out of Silence: The Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Kate Daniels. Triquarterly Books, 1992, pp. ix-xvii.

Folsom, Merrill. “Sarah Lawrence Again Under Fire: Legion Renews Its Attack on College over Hiring ‘Leftist.’” New York Times, 14 Nov. 1958, p. 11. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Gander, Catherine. “Poetry as Embodied Experience: The Pragmatist Aesthetics of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.” Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 7, 2018, pp. 1205-29. Taylor and Francis, DOI: 10.1080/0950236x.2018.1477259.

Keenaghan, Eric. “Biocracy: Reading Poetic Politics through the Traces of Muriel Rukeyser’s Life-Writing.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 43, no. 3, 2013, pp. 258-87. ProjectMuse, DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2013.0014.

—. “There Is No Glass Woman: Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Feminist Essay ‘Many Keys.’” Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 1, nos. 1-2, 2018, pp. 186-204. Taylor and Francis, DOI:10.1080/24692921.2017.1368883.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. U of Pittsburgh P, 2005.

—. The Life of Poetry. 1949. Paris Press, 1996.

—. Statement for “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews.” Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 7, no. 1, 1944, pp. 3-36. ProQuest.

—. “Statement of Miss Muriel Rukeyser.” Typescript, 17 Nov. 1958. Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Box II: 8. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

—. Untitled address to the Modern Language Association’s Radical Caucus. Typescript, undated [c. 1975]. Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Box I: 16. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Wolosky, Shira. “What Do Jews Stand For? Muriel Rukeyser’s Ethics of Identity.” NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, no. 19, 2000, pp. 199-226. EBSCO: Academi”c Search Complete.    

To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Eric Keenaghan. “Total Imaginative Response: Five Undergraduate Studies from ‘The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser.'” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2020/09/05/eric-keenaghan-total-imaginative-response-five-undergraduate-studies-from-the-lives-of-muriel-rukeyser/.

Eric Keenaghan is associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry (Ohio State University Press), and his essays on Muriel Rukeyser have appeared in Journal of Narrative Theory, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Textual Practice. Currently, he is editing a selection of Rukeyser’s uncollected and unpublished essays, lectures, stories, and scripts.

     

Over the course of her career Rukeyser was consistently interested in the ocean as a space of possibilities. For instance, her first book of poems, Theory of Flight (1935), begins with overlapping references to drowned Sappho, Sacco (an Italian-American anarchist executed in 1927), and “Rebellion pioneered among our lives, / viewing from far-off many-branching deltas, / innumerable seas.”¹Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem Out of Childhood,” Theory of Flight (1968). Other poems in which Rukeyser engages with the ocean as a space of possibilities include “Child and Mother” (1935), “Ryder” (1939), “Sea Mercy” (1944), Elegies (1949), “On the Death of Her Mother” (1958), “The Birth of Venus” (1958), “The Outer Banks” (1968), “Searching/ Not Searching” (1973), “After Melville” (1973), and “Islands” (1976). While Rukeyser’s fascination with water, its changes of phase and discursive uses, have drawn critical attention, ²See, for instance, Gerd Hurm’s “Water and ‘the Land’s Disease’: Poetics and Politics of Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’” (Space in America: Theory, History, Culture, edited by Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt, Brill Academic Publishers, 2005, pp.193-208), Trudi Witonsky’s “’A Language of Water’: Back and Forth with Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser” (Women’s Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, 2008, pp. 337-366), and Elisabeth Däumer’s “Context for ‘Waterlily Fire’” on this website. her specific interest in the ocean has remained largely underexplored. Catherine Gander attends to Rukeyser’s representations of the ocean in the poem “Ryder,” ³Catherine Gander, “Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the ‘Melville Revival.’” Journal of American Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 2010, pp. 759-775. but it is poet Alicia Ostriker’s Keynote Speech at the 2013 Rukeyser Centenary Symposium that goes the furthest in considering the ocean in Rukeyser’s work. Describing her experience of reading Rukeyser’s poems, Ostriker declares, “I begin to read and am immediately in danger of drowning. The writing is not merely fluid, it is oceanic. It cannot be paraphrased. . . . But it is beneath the surface that the meanings wait for me.” This experience of learning to breathe underwater is palpable elsewhere in Rukeyser’s poetry. Some of Rukeyser’s most interesting work occurs underwater, as in her poem “Anemone,” included in her 1968 The Speed of Darkness, a book that addresses such varied topics as orgies, lesbianism, motherhood, and suicide, and is widely considered “the first great Second Wave feminist work of poetry.”⁴Peter Middleton, “Science and The New American Poetry.” The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, edited by John R. Woznicki, Lehigh University Press, 2013, p. 173.

An overtly erotic poem, “Anemone” draws connections between the opening and closing of eyes, mouth, sex, and life.

Anemone

My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening.
You are looking into me with your waking look.

My mouth is closing, my mouth is opening.
You are waiting with your red promises.

My sex is closing, my sex is opening.
You are singing and offering : the way in.

My life is closing, my life is opening.
You are here.

The recursive motility of the anemone serves as metaphor for the speaker’s body, alternating between moments of opening and closing, creating an at-times internal and at-times external space in which contained, container, and environment intermingle. While the organism represented in the poem has presumably human organs like eyes, mouth, and sex (sea anemones have photoreceptors, but no eyes, a single opening that functions as both mouth and anus, and they may be gendered or hermaphroditic, reproducing both sexually and asexually),⁵Vicki Martin, “Photoreceptors of Cnidarians.” Canadian Journal of Zoology, vol. 80, no.10, 2002, pp. 1703-1722; Ekaterina S. Bocharova, “Reproductive Biology and Genetic Diversity of the Sea Anemone Aulactinia stella (Verrill, 1864),” Hydrobiologia, no. 759, 2015, pp. 27–38. these organs, in their alternating opening and closing states, function as spaces of connection between speaker and the addressed “you.” This intermingling of individual and environment, speaker and reader, troubles distinctions of the internal and external, undermining individual boundaries in favor of a shared space of fluid exchange. This becomes even more salient when we consider the addressed “you” of the poem as potentially being anyone, including the reader, introducing the possibility of a radically open understanding of the relationship between speaker and addressee. What is created is a space that is both personal and social, reminiscent of the second wave feminist mantra, “the personal is political.”

The imagery and emotion of “Anemone” is interesting for being recursive, but not cyclical. Through the hard stop of periods at the end of each line, and the white space between stanzas, the poem enacts a recurring opening and closing of meanings. Yet each stanza, while similar to the others, also differs in important ways, progressing toward an ultimate intermingling of selves in the poem’s final line “You are here,” in which “You” overlap and are entangled with the body of the speaker. I’m reminded here of the concept of tidalectics, first put forth by the poet Kamau Brathwaite in ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey, expanded upon by theorists such as Paul Naylor and Elizabeth DeLoughery, and most recently inspiring an anthology.⁶Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. We Press, 1999; Elizabeth Deloughery, Routes and Roots. University of Hawai’i Press, 2007; Paul Naylor, Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History. Northwestern University Press, 1999; Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, edited by Stefanie Hessler, The MIT Press, 2018. Challenging dialectical structures, tidalectics emphasizes the fluid mobility of the ocean as a force of developing recursive movements. Describing tidalectics, Bill Aschroft declares that

the movement of the tides is not exactly cyclical, but ebbing and flowing. Although the ocean appears to be engaged in an endless repetition of the same back and forth movement at every moment, the tide is, in fact, never exactly the same nor does it retreat or return to the same spot of “origin.”⁷Bill Ashcroft, Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. Routledge, 2017, p. 156.

Similarly, Rukeyser’s poem does not return to the same starting point, but rather proceeds through back and forth movements that enact overall change.

The concept of tidalectics is helpful for interpreting Rukeyser’s metaphorical usage of a creature inhabiting tidal zones. The anatomy of the anemone has evolved to take advantage of tidal motions, and as Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out in his gloss of Jakob von Uexküll’s work, “the sea anemone has a movement whose rhythm remains regulated by the rhythm of the tides, even if it lives in a still-water aquarium.”⁸ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from Collège de France. Northwestern University Press, 2003, p. 170. Rukeyser’s evocation of the anemone, its opening and closing, and its progression, which is not a synthesis but an evolving mixture between internal and external, evokes the anemone’s life sustaining relationship with this tidal force. My usage of tidalectics here also extends beyond its original uses of evoking islands’ interconnections with the ocean and other locations. Rather, my usage of tidalectics implicates the ebbing and flowing entanglement of bodies, both with their surroundings, and with other bodies. Rukeyser’s “Anemone” begins with closing and opening eyes and progresses to the increasingly tactile organs of mouth and sex, presenting embodiment as an experience of sensuality and desire shared with others. If, as poet Alicia Ostriker claims, “To read Rukeyser is to learn to breathe underwater,” then this is what I think she means.