"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," originally published in College English in the fall of 1972, is an essay by American feminist, poet, teacher, and writer Adrienne Rich (1929-2012). It discusses several concepts needed by women writers to enable them to overcome the conditioning of a patriarchal sense of literary aesthetics and history. The essay, originally a lecture delivered by Rich at a women’s writer convention, emphasizes the need for re-visioning of old texts, renaming of the various aspects of women which have been distorted by a male point of view, and developing a new form of writing that is free of the haunting male gaze, of convention and propriety and of the ‘male’ language and its implications.
Rich says that the act of re-visioning would help women to analyze and to act on “how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh.”
Motivations behind the essay
The essay by Rich was written to support her gender, to let women know that they need to break from the roles which society places upon them. “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.”. Rich stood up for the fact that women had a chance to no longer be afraid to embrace who they are, their individuality; the person that they were other than when they were conforming to societal norms. Rich invested in the term, “fresh eyes” with which she wanted women to see the world; with “fresh eyes,” or seeing the world with a new outlook. An outlook where women do not have to be dominated by men, an outlook where women have a voice and have control as well. Finally, writing the essay was an attempt for Rich’s own self-knowledge, in which she works to find her own self-identification. Although she wanted to motivate women in a male-dominated society, she was also motivating herself to refuse self-destructiveness in the male-dominated world.
Literary connections
The title of the essay is from the play When We Dead Awaken by Henrik Ibsen. The theme of Ibsen's play is the desire and appreciation of life. The play surrounds Irena, a former model and mysterious character, and her idea that although they have been alive, they have not been living. “When we dead awaken we find that we have never lived.”.
The theme of living as opposed to just being alive can be connected to Rich’s theme about women being degraded by society. Although the women that she writes for have been alive, they have not been fully living their lives. Her essay's goal is to motivate women, including herself, to stand up for their rights as human beings: to be equal to the men in a society ruled by men. As Ibsen did in his play, Rich encourages women to “live,” breaking out of their closed shells to do what they want, rather than following what society tells them they must do.
Personal context: gender and creativity
Adrienne Rich was married and had three children during the 1950s. Rich described the fifties as a time when “middle-class women were making careers of domestic perfection”. After having her third child, Rich feared she lost touch with whomever she had been prior to assuming the traditional gender role of wife and mother. The wife-mother role according to Rich required a “putting aside” of the imaginative activity necessary in creative writing. This imaginative activity requires a “freedom of the mind” that transcends and transforms daily experiences by questioning, challenging and conceiving alternatives in regards to reality. Rich states that being “a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive functions of the imagination.”