PRASAD PUBLIC SCHOOL

MATHURA
Session: 2022-23
Subject: English
Project work on “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”.
For the partially fulfilment of AISSCE 2022-23

SUMBITTED TO:
Er. Neeraj Kulshrestha

SUMBITTED BY:
Vedant Rai XII (SCIENCE)
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would lIke to express my specIal

thanks to our mentor mr. neeraj
kulshreshtha sIr for hIs tIme and
efforts he provIded throughout the
year. your useful advIce and
suggestIons were really helpful to me
durIng the project’s completIon. In thIs
aspect, I am eternally grateful to
you.

I would lIke to acknowledge that thIs

project on aunt jennIfer’s tIger’swas
completed entIrely by me and not by
someone else.
 AUNTJENNIFER’S
TIGER

CentralIdeaOfThePoem
The theme of the poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tiger” relates to the issue and
subject of make dominance in society. The theme wants to highlight
the conflicts, issues and struggles that a woman has to face in the
male chauvinistic society. Aunt Jennifer is essentially the protagonist in
the poem and she symbolises or represents the women across the
globe who have been victims of persecution and oppression due to the
patriarchal system. The poet has expressed her concerns for the
women via this poem.

The protagonist of the poem, Aunt Jennifer is doing the embroidery of

Tigers on the piece of clothing with needles and wools which
represents fearlessness, confidence, and strength. These Tigers are
jumping and prancing with great confidence and they have been
described as having a golden yellow colour. These Tigers are
described as dwelling in the world of green as they live in dense
forests. The Tigers are not afraid of the men who are standing under
the tree, since they are bold, fearless, and strong.

Aunt Jennifer is scarred and traumatized by the ordeals of male-

dominated society and her marital life. This is why her fingers and
hands are fluttering in fear and this is the reason why is unable to put
the needle through the piece of cloth that she was supposed to be
stitching. Aunt Jennifer was not able to withstand the burden and
pressures of the responsibilities that are put on married women. She
felt subjugated, compelled, and was not able to express herself freely.
This poem delivers the message even when the protagonist is
suffering hugely and might be dead from the outside, but the Tigers
that exist within her not only help her to survive but also thrive.

This poem delivers a very important message in the context of

women’s experiences in a male-dominated society and how adversely
it impacts the lives of women, especially married women. Through her
imagination and craft, the poet touches on a very relevant and
significant subject that continues to drive conversations even today.
The poem implores the women to bring courage by breaking the
shackles and becoming bold and fearless like the Tigers.
 Poet’sBiography
Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16,
1929,the elder of two sisters. Her father, pathologist Arnold Rice Rich,
was the chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School.
Her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich, was a concert pianist and a
composer. Her father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was a
Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians. Her paternal
grandfather Samuel Rice was an Ashkenazi immigrant from Košice in
the Austro-Hungarian Empire (preent day Slovakia), while his mother
was a Sephardi Jew from Vicksburg, Mississippi. Samuel Rice owned
a successful shoe store in Birmingham. Adrienne Rich's early poetic
influence stemmed from her father, who encouraged her to read but
also to write her own poetry. Her interest in literature was sparked
within her father's library, where she read the work of writers such as
Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tennyson.
Her father was ambitious for Adrienne and "planned to create a
prodigy." Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were home schooled
by their mother until Adrienne began public education in the fourth
grade. The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship
with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents'
ambitions for her—moving into a world in which she was expected to
excel.

In later years, Rich went to Roland Park Country School, which she
described as a "good old fashioned girls' school [that] gave us fine role
models of single women who were intellectually impassioned." After
graduating from high school, Rich earned her college diploma at
Radcliffe College, where she focused primarily on poetry and learning
writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all. In 1951, her last
year at college, Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World,
was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of
Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the
published volume. Following her graduation, Rich received a
Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year. Following a visit
to Florence, she chose not to return to Oxford, and spent her
remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy.In 1953, Rich
married AlfredHaskellConrad, an economics professor at Harvard
University she met as an undergraduate. She said of the match: "I
married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my
first family. I wanted what I saw as a full woman's life, whatever was
possible." They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had three
sons. In 1955, she published her second volume, The Diamond
Cutters, a collection she said she wished had not been published,
saying "a lot of the poems are incredibly derivative," and citing a
"pressure to produce again... to make sure I was still a poet." That year
she also received the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award from the
Poetry Society of America.

From 1967 to 1969, Rich lectured at Swarthmore College and taught at

Columbia University School of the Arts as an adjunct professor in the
Writing Division. Additionally, in 1968, she began teaching in the SEEK
program in City College of New York, a position she continued until
1975. During this time, Rich also received the Eunice Tietjens
Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine. Rich and Conrad hosted anti-
war and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment. Rising
tensions began to split the marriage, and Rich moved out in mid-1970,
getting herself a small studio apartment nearby.Shortly afterward, in
October, Conrad drove into the woods and shot himself, widowing
Rich.
In 1971, she was the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the
Poetry Society of America and spent the next year and a half teaching
at Brandeis University as the Hurst Visiting Professor of Creative
Writing.Diving into the Wreck, a collection of exploratory and often
angry poems, split the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Allen
Ginsberg, The Fall of America.Declining to accept it individually, Rich
was joined by the two other feminist poets nominated, Alice
Walker and Audre Lorde, to accept it on behalf of all women "whose
voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world."The
following year, Rich took up the position of the Lucy Martin Donnelly
Fellow at Bryn Mawr College.In 1976, Rich began her partnership with
Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, which lasted until her
death. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as
Experience and Institution, published the same year, Rich
acknowledged that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well as a
personal issue, writing, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in
me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs."The
pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated
into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978),
marked the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her
writing, themes which run throughout her work afterwards, especially
in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late
poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001).In her analytical
work Adrienne Rich: the moment of change, Langdell suggests these
works represent a central rite of passage for the poet, as she (Rich)
crossed a threshold into a newly constellated life and a "new
relationship with the universe".During this period, Rich also wrote a
number of key socio-political essays, including "Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence", one of the first to address the
theme of lesbian existence.In this essay, she asks "how and why
women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-
workers, lovers, community, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into
hiding".Some of the essays were republished in On Lies, Secrets and
Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (1979). In integrating such pieces
into her work, Rich claimed her sexuality and took a role in leadership
for sexual equality.

From 1976 to 1979, Rich taught at City College and Rutgers

University as an English professor. In 1979, she received an honorary
doctorate from Smith College and moved with Cliff to Montague, MA.
Ultimately, they moved to Santa Cruz, where Rich continued her
career as a professor, lecturer, poet, and essayist. Rich and Cliff took
over editorship of the lesbian arts journal Sinister Wisdom (1981–
1983).Rich taught and lectured at UC Santa Cruz, Scripps
College, San Jose State University, and Stanford University during the
1980s and 1990s.From 1981 to 1987, Rich served as an A.D. White
Professor-At-Large for Cornell University.Rich published several
volumes in the next few years: Your Native Land, Your
Life (1986), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), and Time's Power:
Poems 1985–1988 (1989). She also was awarded the Ruth Paul Lilly
Poetry Prize (1986), the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters
from NYU, and the National Poetry Association Award for
Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry (1989).

In 1977, Rich became an associate of the Women's Institute for

Freedom of the Press (WIFP).WIFP is an American non-profit
publishing organization. The organization works to increase
communication between women and connect the public with forms of
women-based media.

Janice Raymond, in the foreword of her 1979 book The Transsexual

Empire, thanked Rich for "constant encouragement"and cited her in
the book's chapter "Sappho by Surgery.” The Transsexual Empire" is
considered by LGBT and feminist critics to be transphobic,and many
have criticized Rich for her involvement in and support of its
production. While Rich never explicitly disavowed her support for
Raymond's work, Leslie Feinberg cites Rich as having been supportive
during Feinberg's writing of Transgender Warriors

Rich suffered for much of her life from rheumatoid arthritis. In March of
2012, at the age of 82, Rich died in her home in Santa Cruz, California,
of her arthritis. Her last collection was published in 2012, entitled Later
Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012.
 Poet’s Creations

 a change of world strives to let the histories of women’s

poetries unfold in the words of the poets who lived, wrote, published,
and performed during these years—and to use as frequently as possible
the words of the poems that inspired them to do so. But we consider
this an ongoing story as women poets of all ages, orientations,
backgrounds, experiences, and identifications continue to draw
inspiration from one another both on the page and off. “From Audre
Lorde’s voice, not just the poems on the page,” says Joan Larkin, “I felt
I had permission to speak strongly, to speak out, to be proud.”
.

 Inthe dIamond cutters,Rich focuses on the

motivating factors causing the speaker's internal retreat. Rich
associates limiting relationships and domestic roles as the
primary cause of emotional denial. The speakers, who feel
constrained by unsatisfying relationships or limiting domestic
roles, learn to repress their emotions in order to survive in their
environment. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law illustrates the
affects of repression in poems such as "Antinous."
 dIvIng Into the wreckexplores the inequalities in
male and female relationships in the effort to expose the
inequalities in language. Rich searches for a situation which will
provide equality of the sexes. Because she is unable to find
equality in male and female relationships, she explores the notion
of androgyny. Androgyny, however, does not pose a realistic
solution to gender inequalities.

 on lIes, secrets, and sIlence is a sort of travel

diary, documenting Adrienne Rich's journeys to the frontier and
into the interior. It traces the development of one individual
consciousness, "playing over such issues as motherhood,
racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of
language".

 blood, bread, and poetry collects fifteen essays

by noted American poet, lesbian, and feminist Adrienne Rich,
some of which were first presented as lectures or speeches. The
essays are arranged in chronological order of composition, from
1979 to 1985. The anthology revolves around the central
thematic issues of contemporary feminism, articulating a range of
subtopics, particularly women’s history, women and literature,
and academic women’s studies.
 Article
Depression has long been perceived as attractive in the western
artistic tradition. Pain, sorrow, melancholy, suffering has long been
romanticized, be it literature, visual arts, or cinema (joining in
recently). The same has transcended into popular culture, into the
lifestyle of people. Expressions of unhappiness are the new normal.
The result is anxiety-driven and existentially depressed individuals of
the 21st century.These sections of popular culture with a cult
following, glorify larger than life characters as those who smile less,
are lost in thought, absorbed by their own sorrows, with a different
kind of charm. Their smiles are strained and brief. They are
considered beautiful not despite their sadness but because of it.
However curious this may sound, but this is what it is. Sadness is a
new charm.Your longing for love is empowered by the desire to
understand and to be understood. You want to connect to those who
are like you.

Who see life as you see.Given the prevalent false ideas in culture and
rampant materialism invading natural living, you or anybody else for
that matter won’t be attracted to those who find the business of life
and living very easy. Rather, you will be attracted to those who are
puzzled and saddened by this ugly reality that you perceive, to those
who want to escape and withdraw from the daily grind of life. You are
attracted to anxious, depressed, and hopeless people, for you are like
them, one of them.Since sadness, depression, anxiety, etc. are not
real, all that needs to be done is verifying and validating all the beliefs
you have and accepting those that can be validated. While shunning
those that are false and are of no use. Simply a proper round of
introspection like this will help you reach that default state of
happiness which is ever-present in that you are born with.
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