Analysis #5

The Stranger by Adrienne Rich

Looking as I’ve always looked before, straight down the heart

Of the street to the river

Walking the river of the avenues

Feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt

Watching the lights turn on in the towers

Walking as I’ve always walked before

Like a man, like a woman, in the city

My visionary anger cleansing my sight

And the detailed perceptions of mercy

Flowering from that anger

If I come home into a room out of a sharp misty light

And hear them talking a dead language

If they ask me my identity

What can I say but

I am the androgyne

I am the living mind you fail to describe

In your dead language

In the lost noun, the verb surviving

Only in the infinite

The letters of my name are written under the lids

Of the newborn child

Analysis (Postmodern)

Postmodernism is a movement away from the modern.

      The narrator is within a city where people sit around and talk, this implies a modern environment/push for the new. However the narrator looks past the city to nature and envisions a new world where nature is infused with progress. She looks as before (a citizen) but she has developed a suspicious eye against the global cultural narrative or meta narrative. She is breaking away and becoming something new and in doing so sees those who are obsessed with the ideology of “new” as dead/outdated.

       Reality is a social construct and thus social structures, institutions, gender constructions, and the formation of language are all creations related to power and motivation. The narrator seeks to separate herself from the urban machine, social groups, gender identity, and the repressive nature of language.

The narrator speaks of a child (postmodernism) who sees her name and thus her true self. In a postmodern society she can be seen as an individual without classification.