Adrienne Rich, poet and activist, was a leading voice within the feminist politics and discourse of the 1960s through to the 1980s. Throughout these decades, Rich made the shift from writing ‘tasteful’ poetry to engaging in expansive and groundbreaking feminist and gender theory. David Zuger speaks of this transformation from her earlier work of “painstaking, decorous poems that are eager to ‘maturely’ accept the world” to “a poet bitterly unable to feel at home in a world ‘that gives no room / to be what we dreamt of being’” (Poet and Critic).

Her seminal essay on ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’, published in 1980, made waves within a previously scarce field of exploration: the invisibility of lesbianism within literature and society and the societal urge to impose a ‘norm’ of heterosexuality.

In ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’, Rich makes explicit the fact that the societal urge for heterosexuality is not a biological norm but an artificial one, imposed to maintain an order in which women are subordinate to men. This is not a natural order of being, but a result of a widespread societal focus on “male needs, male fantasies about women, and male interest in controlling women” (634).

This notion of heterosexuality as the norm, and even as the only way of existing, renders lesbian experience “deviant", “abhorrent”, “or simply invisible” within cultural works (632). Yet, Rich insists, lesbianism and platonic female relationships are both real and natural; “women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, nonheterosexual, woman-connected existence” (635). 

This existence is not limited to lesbianism itself. The personal and political interests of Rich have often led readers to interpret her works purely through a lens of queer sexuality. However, Rich’s poetry is multifaceted in its various themes, from anti-war sentiment to radical feminism and gender fluidity. If she speaks in her theoretical works of the danger of imposing binaries of all kinds within society, she reflects this expertly within her poetry. 

Rich’s ‘Diving Into the Wreck’ (a copy of which can be easily sourced online) offers what I find to be her most deft and thorough study of human identity as seen through gender theory. The marine diver in the poem, initially out of place in the “grave and awkward” diving suit, gradually becomes more at one with the “wreck”, until eventually they/we “are the half destroyed instruments” at the bottom of the ocean. 

The reader is intimately guided along with the diver’s descent into the wreck through the frequent use of the plural pronoun “we”. Their body (our bodies) gains plurality and fluidity until they are both “he” and “she”: “the mermaid whose dark hair/ streams black, the merman in his armoured body.”

Rich’s drive to explore a fluidity that she knows exists pushes her down, deeper into a wreck, away from a world that imposes and upholds strict binaries. The diver’s search, after all, is for the truth and not the assumed truth – “the wreck and not the story of the wreck”, “the thing itself” and not the “myth”. And this search for real (and multiple) truths reflects (expertly) the feeling of expressing or understanding one’s truthful identity, whether or not it aligns with societal expectations. Rich’s diver does not expect to find a neat image, but a ruin to experience, rather than understand. As Lindroth so expertly puts it, the diver, the poet and the reader take a “descent into self” and emerge, “the explorer who has descended into the depths of their being and returned transformed by discovery” (Tropes of Discovery, 75).