STUDY OF ADRIENNE RICH’S “READINGS OF HISTORY” – Dr.J.

JENITHA

Study of Adrienne Rich’s

“Readings of History”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) was the point at which Rich’s poetry

changed dramatically and talked about history, domesticity, family and women’s
writing. The poem “Readings of History” appears in this poem collection. The six
sections of this poem deal with different scenes or vignettes that the poet has
picked out from history and presents her readings of them.
Epigraph
The epigraph to the poem gives a quote on Luigi Pirandello extracted from
Dominico Vittorini’s The Drama of Luigi Pirandello. Here Vittorini writes that
Luigi Pirandello was happy to relate to the historic fact that he had been born
near Girgenti in a place called Chaos during a raging cholera epidemic.
The epigraph hints at the poem’s theme on how man’s present is linked with
history and with the theme of the importance of historians in revealing the truth
to the world. Relating to the past in history is what sets man free from the
coldness of the present.

(Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer,

winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre
within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921; Six
Characters in Search of an Author), he became an important innovator in
modern drama.
In The Drama of Luigi Pirandello, Domenico Vittorini shows first how Pirandello's
compassionate pessimism and tragic mockery resulted from his own tortured
existence and in what way his art is related to Italian literary tradition and
contemporary thought. Proceeding chronologically, Pirandello's growth is
traced from the elementary naturalism of his early writing, through his more
reflective plays, to the crowning achievements of later years in which dramatic
situations are approached from a highly intellectualized point of view.)

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The poem is divided into 6 sections:

I The Evil Eye
II The Confrontation
III Memorabilia
IV Consanguinity
V The Mirror
VI The Covenant
I The Name of the first section – The Evil Eye refers to the camera.
(Stereopticon is a slide projector that combines two images to create a three-
dimensional effect, or makes one image dissolve into another.)
This section begins with a typical picture at home where two people are having
a pleasant conversation while watching some images on a stereopticon. They
were laughing at the genre views of 1906. The poet was happily looking at the
scene of a parlor until she was struck by the scene’s similarity to herself in her
home and her heart sank. On the stereopticon, the parlor was beautifully fringed
and tasselled. But the chaste/vestal scene was contrasted with borders of hairy
crested plants to right and left. She was viewing the scene that had been
recorded several years ago. And she sensed the decay that the scene would have
fallen into now – with mildew, dust. Seeing the scene through the eye of the
camera highlighted the sense of decay.
In the second stanza in this section, she herself is seated before the camera. She
realises that she too will be non-existent and the camera is the evil eye that
swallows her essence. She feels that it is a murderer that stabs her. (Celluloid is
a name for film used in shooting movies. Because of its use in making films, this
term came to stand for movies in general. ) The poet sadly writes that the womb
of celluloid will swallow her dotage and her absence. Both the happiness of her
life, her presence and her absence are contained by the evil eye of the camera.

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II The second section is named “The Confrontation”

This section begins with a description of Luigi Pirandello.

The poet writes that he looked like “an old historian.”

The poet writes here about the plight of Luigi Pirandello with his hysteric wife.
For fourteen years Luigi lived with Maria Antonietta Portulano who suffered a
sudden and irreversible nervous breakdown. The poet writes that he faced his
criminal reflection in the mind of his wife which the poet compares to Grand
Guignol, a theatre in Paris. According to the poet, he built the hall of mirrors
again and again in those 14 years. Hall of mirrors is a reference to his play titled
Henry IV. This layered and cerebrally psychedelic 1920s masterpiece ushers you
into the delirious hall of mirrors that is the mind of a man who, after an accident
while at a medieval pageant, is locked into the role he played in the pageant,
Henry IV, for the next twenty years. Hence the lines –
That hall of mirrors
In which to be appears
To be perceived
The poet makes the point that the man lived his whole life as an object being
scrutinized, his very existence was only by being observed by another – his wife.
The title of this section refers to this confrontation – between what appears and
what is perceived. – the real vs the point of view.
The ensuing lines portray the cleverness of the mad. “The present holds you like
a raving wife.” Just as Pirandello’s wife drained the life from him by her constant
ravings, how even in madness she was clever in digging up his faults. She
remembers even what he hopes and also the things he wanted to forget. Their

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life itself was the collective knowledge of and about the two of them. Her mind
works so fast that Pirandello is unable to find the connection between her
thoughts when she raves. The only thing left for him to do is to go out for a walk
and think of their happy days long past.
(Henry IV seems to have been largely influenced by his wife's illness, and
contains the themes of madness, illusion and isolation. The protagonist goes
mad after falling from a horse in a masquerade and imaging that he really is the
character he was pretending to play, Henry IV. His madness is supported by a
wealthy relative who provides him with retainers. Twelve years later he wakes
out of his delusion, but continues to feign insanity when he realizes that he
prefers the stability of his world to the vagaries of the real world. When he is
visited by the woman he used to love, her lover, her daughter, and a doctor, he
becomes very angry with them for trying to snap him out of his madness. The
play ends with the death of her lover, and Henry IV continues with the pretense
of madness in order to escape punishment. The rules of sanity slowly vanish in
a labyrinth of mirrors that reflect ever-changing masked images of ourselves and
memory bleeds into hazy dreams of multiple realities.)

III Memorabilia
In this section the poet recollects her memories of her great grand uncle who
had fought in the civil war. He had written letters to them at the time. The poet
was fifteen years old and lived at Chancellorsville at the time. The poet candidly
states that there was no one to narrate the contents of the letter as raconteur
or anyone to even spell the words of the letter. The poet only recollects that he
had written letters at all and he had later died in battle. He only lived on in his
father’s memory. By invoking dilthey’s dream, the poet presents a contrast of
how people usually live as though in a dream. But the reality is the war that has
happened in the woods which we have never seen. Here too the poet shifts the
angle of view- at first it is the quiet scene from the past where they are reading
the great grand uncle’s letter. But the point of view starkly shifts into the dream
state in which man lives as opposed to the scene of war where lives are lost.

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(Raconteur is a person who tells anecdotes in a skilful and amusing way.)

Dilthey’s Dream refers to:

IV Consanguinity
In this section again the scene starts with a quite room where a child is seated
on the grandmother’s sofa. When reading the Victorian books, they feel like
they are relatives of the Victorian characters. This is what the poet refers to as
consanguinity, the Victorians being the common ancestors of the Americans
and the British.
In the second stanza there is a shift in the point of view. Time is shown to have
passed with the cat tails withering and dust gathering. The poet leafs through
the pages of LIFE from the II world war and sees pictures of the girls from that
time. She contrasts these girls with her contemporaries. The women in Europe
are now so much steeped in fashion and artificiality that even their eyelids are
painted to match their luggage.
The section ends with a paradoxical statement –“I too have lived in history.”
The poet understands that every moment of her life is a part of history and
that she is a continuation and part of the Victorian ancestors.
(Consanguinity means the fact of being descended from the same ancestor.)

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V Mirror
Adrienne Rich’s father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was a
Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians. So she writes in the
poem that she was “Split at the root – neither Gentile nor Jew.”
This stanza too starts with a parlor scene where she is going through history
authored by Michelet and Motley. The poet wonders at the dichotomous
nature of her need to read and interpret history, whether she reads history to
find or to lose herself; to know the past or to forget the present. She compares
her need to read history with Morris Cohen’s need for history. She asks Cohen
if he reads the Judaic chronicles to get a deeper understanding of himself, or to
“shut out the tick-tock of self.” She wonders whether he wanted to escape
from the reality around him, by delving into routine questions and answers.
(Michelet was a French historian- Jules Michelet was the first historian to use
and define the word Renaissance and John Lothrop Motley (April 15, 1814 –
May 29, 1877) was an American author, best known for his two popular
histories The Rise of the Dutch Republic and The United Netherlands. He was
also a diplomat, who helped to prevent European intervention on the side of
the Confederates in the American Civil War.
Morris Cohen –He began his career as a history teacher and later turned
professor of philosophy. Cohen is the author of several noteworthy
publications, including Reason and Nature (1931), Law and the Social Order
(1933), and Faith of a Liberal (1945). In the later years of Cohen's life, as a
result of the rise of Nazism, he began to champion Jewish interests. In 1933 he
founded the Conference on Jewish Relations, an organization that assumed
responsibility for scientific research on Jewish problems. He relates the details
of this organization's activity in his autobiography, A Dreamer's Journey (1949),
which also is valuable for its commentary on the Jews of Cohen's generation.)
VI The Covenant
The last section deals with confronting the truth from the past. The present is
so cold and wicked that she finds her fingers freezing like a bunch of keys. The
only warmth is found in the past. That can save them from the wretchedness
and sorrow of the present. Memories may be both good or bad – of happy
picnics, closets or of sad sickness, insomnia and nightmare. But any memory
would be warm like a blanket and thaw their frozen bones.

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Here a historian is regarded as a man who has made a covenant with truth.
The poet reading history is pictured as sitting at his deathbed. The dying man
has hidden the truth in letters in his mattress. At his death he can at last reveal
the truth and read them aloud. The poet at his death bed is shown to see the
terrible truth in the letters and she takes upon herself the awesome work of
carrying on the job of conveying the truth that is found in history to the world.
She allows the historian to take rest and sleep in death. She concludes the
poem with the line:” I take your life into my living head.” The life of the
historian refers to the truth which he had made a covenant to reveal to the
world. She now holds within herself the task of revealing the truth that is
found in history.