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Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America

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Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia
Suskin Ostriker is a comprehensive review of women's poetry that shaped the
feminist movement after the 1960s. The critical work illustrates a struggle that
women poets faced in their road to self-expression. Ostriker, who received her
literary education in the 1950s and 1960s, seldom encountered women poets. Poetry
was dominated by male writers and critics. Males claimed universality in the literary
language, recognizing the woman writer as the "other." The gender bias is evident
even in the criticism of women poets. Ostriker says that "the language used to
express literary admiration in general presumes the masculinity of the author, the
work, and the act of creation but not if the author is a woman."
[1]
Gender defined
the criticism that a poem would receive, rather than the actual work itself. The new
wave of poetry, starting in the 1960s, featured women poets who chose to "explore
experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to their
exploration."
[1]
The multitude of styles and subjects that these women poets use
constitutes a new movement, one that is "comparable to romanticism or modernism
in our literary past."
[1]

Synopsis
The subject of Stealing the Language is that of the extraordinary tide of poetry by
American women
[1]
stemming from 1960 and the literary movement that this work
engenders. For Ostriker, these women poets are challenging and transforming the
history of poetry.
[1]
The introduction raises key themes woven throughout the book
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of the systematic and oppressive gendering of customary literary language, the
critical and social dismissal of a poets exploration of female experience, and the
difficulty of acknowledging difference and originality of women poets.
"Stealing the Language is an attempt to collectively redefine woman and woman
poet.
[2]
A central point of the work is the that women writers have been imprisoned
in an oppressors language which denies them access to authoritative
expression.
[3]
The title of the book references the need to steal and re-appropriate
the language with all its male privilege into a language which can better describe and
more fully express womens experiences. Chapter 1, entitled Im Nobody: Womens
Poetry, 1650-1960, discusses the confined past of American womens poetry.
Ostriker notes the evolution from the unfettered and relatively unconstrained Colonial
period since there were so few women poets, to the increase of women poets in the
19th century causing reactionary cultural restriction. With the advent of modernism,
the general quality of womens poetry rise and topics for poetry became more far
more open. Ostriker writes, [that] like every literary movement, contemporary
womens poetry in part perpetuates and in part denounces and renounces its
past.
[4]
This in turn creates a paradoxical situation where women writers today credit
their predecessors with contributing the line of feeling to American poetry
[4]
while
also creating work that attempts to surmount the mental and moral
confinements
[4]
of their forbearers. Ostriker then discusses connected motifs in
womens poetry in the subsequent chapters. The motifs discussed constitute an
extended investigation of culturally repressed elements in female identity
[3]
but also
evinces that the subjects of womens poetry tend to generate particular formal and
stylistic decisions, often designed to disrupt and alter our sense of literary
norms.
[5]
Chapter 2, Divided Selves: The Quest for Identity, argues the central
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project of the womens poetry movement is a quest for autonomous self-
definition.
[4]
It further discusses female identity images, which are all variations on
the theme of a divided self, rooted in the authorized dualities of the
culture.
[4]
Chapter 3, Body Language: The Release of Anatomy deals with an
array of attitudes to the body, ranging from a sense of its vulnerability to a sense of
its power, and concludes with a consideration of the way women write about nature,
or the worlds body, as continuous or equivalent with their own.
[3]
Ostriker notes that
in the definition of a personal identity, women tend to start with their bodies, as well
as to interpret external reality through the medium of the body.
[3]
Chapter 4, Herr
God, Herr Lucifer: Anger, Violence, and Polarization focuses on elements of anger
and violence in womens poetry. These subjects are equivalent expressions of rage
at entrapment in gender-polarized relationships.
[3]
In this vein, poems of a satiric or
retaliatory nature that seek to dismantle the myth of the male as lover, hero, father,
and God are designed to confirm polarization and hierarchy as
intolerable.
[3]
Chapter 5, The Imperative of Intimacy: Female Erotics, Female
Poetics centers on the question of female desire, attempting to show how an
'imperative of intimacy'shapes the way women write love poetry, poetry about the
family, about spiritual ancestresses and sisters, about a political life, and about self-
integration.
[3]
This imperative stems from a communal, plural identity, which is not
merely personal, although poems of this nature commonly function as personal
transactions between poets and readers.
[3]
The final chapter, Thieves of Language:
Women Poets and Revisionist Mythology examines revisionist mythmaking as a
major strategy to overcome the denial of authoritative expression. Revision of myths
invades the sanctuaries of language where our meanings for male and female are
stored; to rewrite them from a female point of view is to discover new possibilities for
4

meaning.
[3]
Through revisionist mythmaking, an exploration and a transformation of
the self and culture at large is possible.
Critical reception[edit]
Ms. Magazine called it the most important contribution to contemporary poetry of the
year",
[6]
while Booklist praised the scope of the book as an eye-opener of a study.
[6]

Mentions
Since its 1987 publication, Stealing the Language has been groundbreaking for
feminist literary criticism as well as for the feminist poetry movement. Google
Scholar shows that it is cited in at least 355 scholarly works with varied subjects
ranging from studies of individual women poets like Anne Sexton and Adrienne
Rich to books on feminist literary criticism and the gendered nature of
language.
[7]
The importance of Stealing the Language to the interconnected fields
of feminist literary criticism, feminist poetry, and gender studies must not be
underestimated.
References[edit]
1. ^ Jump up to:
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Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing
the Language: The Emergence of Womens Poetry
in America, The Womens Press , London, 1987, p.
3
2. Jump up^ Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the
Language: The Emergence of Womens Poetry in
America, The Womens Press, London, 1987, p.240
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3. ^ Jump up to:
a

b

c

d

e

f

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h

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Ostriker, Alicia Suskin.
Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Womens
Poetry in America, The Womens Press, London,
1987, p. 11
4. ^ Jump up to:
a

b

c

d

e
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing
the Language: The Emergence of Womens Poetry
in America, The Womens Press, London, 1987, p.
10
5. Jump up^ Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the
Language: The Emergence of Womens Poetry in
America, The Womens Press, London, 1987, p. 12
6. ^ Jump up to:
a

b
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the
Language: The Emergence of Womens Poetry in
America, The Womens Press, London, 1987
7. Jump up^ Google Scholar: Ostriker: Stealing the
Language[1].
External links[edit]
" Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America
" GoogleScholar: Ostriker, Stealing the Language
Categories:
American poetry
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