(Snap)shots of a Daughter- in- Law: Negotiation between “the Energy of Creation and the Energy of Relation”

Abstract

With the publication of her third volume of poetry, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), Rich demonstrates a significant transition in her poetry and feminist consciousness. Her previous two volumes are not only imitative but also inauthentic and unoriginal. The third volume of poems came after eight year of gap. The reasons for the gap are personal as well as artistic. In these eight years of silence, she was continually struggling with feelings of entrapment, anger, and bitterness that evoked a strong sense of abandoning her artistic self. Her desire to write conflicted with the socially expected roles of a wife and mother. But in her third volume, she skillfully fuses the woman and the poet, the personal and political, and the private and public which initiates her journey to become one of the most influential lesbian-feminist poets and critics. Writing poems that are no longer traditional in theme and structure, the poet began to challenge the existing constraints of society on women. Thus the poems become not merely a medium for containing ideas and thoughts but also for the liberation of the self and womanhood.