Women’s oppression and feminine identity politics have always been among the recurrent themes of modern world literature, not least in (post)modern women’s poetry in English, as throughout history women have continually been suppressed and marginalized in patriarchal societies. “Diving into the Wreck” (1973), an often-anthologized short lyrical poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), addresses the question of how women should deal with the governing value system in a male-dominated society. The present qualitative, library-based research aimed at studying the theme of women’s identity politics from the viewpoint of Julia Kristeva’s Poststructuralist Feminist theory, arguing that the poem promotes the use of language as a source of knowledge and a means of protesting verbally against a patriarchal society that divides people into binary oppositions of male / female and masculine / feminine. The results of the present analysis indicated that Rich’s text suggestively demands that through language women should penetrate the dark side of mutilated history, biased culture, and patriarchal values to retrieve and revive their (true) feminine identities. Thus, by exploring the impact of language on the revival of feminine values and demonstrating how women could deploy traditional values to undermine the same gender-biased traditions, this study can help readers gain a deeper understanding of Rich’s poetry and also carry significant implications for teaching poetry and poetic language, especially feminine writing.
