Diving Into The Wreck

The enduring narrative is often the conservative one. The messier, perhaps less socially acceptable histories, can be brushed aside in favor of the more easily digestible. Moreover, the stories of marginalized peoples may be portrayed in one-dimensional or limited ways. How does one go about salvaging these systematically erased or diluted stories? How can one ever feel a part of a community which has been made inaccessible over time? What, if anything, is a marginalized person’s duty in regards to public perception of her identity? Adrienne Rich grapples with these questions in her poem, “Diving into the Wreck”, in which a speaker goes on a metaphorical journey and transformation in pursuit of self-understanding. The poem’s carefully plotted

The speaker uses the mythic text as her guidebook for the start of her exploration, holding its content in her mind as she ventures into the wreck. She refers to the book’s words as “purposes” and “maps” (53-54), but as she continues on she challenges, rather than confirms, the text. The speaker wants to experience “the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth” (62-63). By engaging in a first hand, physical encounter, rather than a linguistic interpretation, she confronts the book of myths’ normative portrayal of her chaotic past. The book, consequently, comes to represent the exclusive and masked nature of the wreck’s role in the wider public. By the conclusion of the poem, the speaker explains that the names of herself and her predecessors “do not appear” (94) within the text of the book. The book, then, only partially relays the narrative of the wreck, failing to represent all of the people involved with the event and aftermath. In this way, the speaker challenges the book of myths, which presents a censored account of the wreck which only personal journey and experience can

The book of myths’ symbolism helps suggest the metaphorical connotations of it as a whole, which is further established through queer and feminist subtext. The book of myths is an exclusionary text which deprives certain people, including the speaker herself, from receiving recognition for their actions. This systematic exclusion is analogous to the erasure of marginalized peoples in widespread historical narratives. The speaker expands on this metaphor as she describes the chaos wreck and personifies the ship. She paints a picture of the ship as a drowned figure, with “ribs of the disaster” (68), “breasts [that] still bear the stress” (79), and “half-destroyed instruments” (83). While describing the ship in these broken and gendered terms, the speaker also conveys a gender fluidity and her own interconnectedness to the wreck. She describes herself as both “the mermaid” (72) and “the merman” (73), and uses “we” (74) to unify herself with the ruins. The speaker’s allusions to the personified wreck being gender fluid set up a queer subtext that illuminates the shipwreck as a metaphor for the histories of marginalized peoples. The speaker has come to “explore the wreck” (52) of these societally repressed identities to which she belongs in order to gain personal understanding of something with a limited public, societal representation. The wreck symbolizes all that the speaker fears and wonders about herself and the community to which she