Gender Typing In The Confessional Poetr
Gender Typing in the Confessional Poetry of Judith Wright
Judith Wright (1915-2000), a poet, an essayist, a short story writer, and an activist, represents her hardship, gender-awareness, protest against the imperial outlook of patriarchy and her typical attitude towards men in her confessional poetry. She is considered the best poet of Australia and is globally recognized for writing poetry in a confessional mode. The poet through her subjective voice portrays a collective condition of women of her society. In many of her poems, she unveils women’s sufferings which chiefly relate to male domination. She both explicitly and implicitly expresses her experiences in her poems. The poet analogizes herself sometimes with nature and sometimes with the vulnerable condition of the downtrodden people, especially the black. She does not come across any difference between the condition of women, and that of nature and of the black. For her, all are equally tortured and exploited by the socially benefited class. Her poetry is also the embodiment of her suffering, humiliation, deprivation, suppression and oppression, which are identical experiences of every woman of patriarchal society. Wright’s Childhood: A Period of Depression and Darkness
Judith Wright for the first time became a victim of patriarchal favoritism at her home: “Family has always been the so called ‘feminine’ realm in the paternal colonial scenario of Australia where men are predominantly engaged in explorations and mastering of women” (Das Men 147).When she was two and a half years old, her younger brother was born and from his birth her position in the family became worthless. She says, “It was his arrival that first set me on the path out of Eden. Fair-haired, brown-eyed, happy and cooed over by everyone, while I was dark-haired, greenish-eyed and female, he had supplanted me” (Half a Lifetime 30). The scenario is not a new one in a male-dominated society:
[T]he majority of parents wish to have sons
Judith Wright (1915-2000), a poet, an essayist, a short story writer, and an activist, represents her hardship, gender-awareness, protest against the imperial outlook of patriarchy and her typical attitude towards men in her confessional poetry. She is considered the best poet of Australia and is globally recognized for writing poetry in a confessional mode. The poet through her subjective voice portrays a collective condition of women of her society. In many of her poems, she unveils women’s sufferings which chiefly relate to male domination. She both explicitly and implicitly expresses her experiences in her poems. The poet analogizes herself sometimes with nature and sometimes with the vulnerable condition of the downtrodden people, especially the black. She does not come across any difference between the condition of women, and that of nature and of the black. For her, all are equally tortured and exploited by the socially benefited class. Her poetry is also the embodiment of her suffering, humiliation, deprivation, suppression and oppression, which are identical experiences of every woman of patriarchal society. Wright’s Childhood: A Period of Depression and Darkness
Judith Wright for the first time became a victim of patriarchal favoritism at her home: “Family has always been the so called ‘feminine’ realm in the paternal colonial scenario of Australia where men are predominantly engaged in explorations and mastering of women” (Das Men 147).When she was two and a half years old, her younger brother was born and from his birth her position in the family became worthless. She says, “It was his arrival that first set me on the path out of Eden. Fair-haired, brown-eyed, happy and cooed over by everyone, while I was dark-haired, greenish-eyed and female, he had supplanted me” (Half a Lifetime 30). The scenario is not a new one in a male-dominated society:
[T]he majority of parents wish to have sons