Diving into the Wreck: Historical & Literary Context

Second-Wave Feminism

Adrienne Rich often wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective, and for this reason her work must be situated within feminism. “Diving into the Wreck” was first published in 1973, at which point the women’s liberation movement had been alive for nearly a century. In the United States, the so-called “first wave” of feminism began in the late nineteenth century, and it initially focused on winning women the right to vote. Once female enfranchisement had been secured in 1920, the movement shifted its emphasis to matters of gender equity, though mostly for middle-class white women. A second wave of feminism emerged in the 1960s. This wave attempted to develop solidarity among women from different social, economic, and racial backgrounds. Scholars and activists associated with second-wave feminism drew inspiration from Betty Friedan’s bestselling 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. In that book, the author critically examines and ultimately challenges the damaging assumption that women derive fulfilment primarily from domestic life as wives and mothers. Admittedly, the speaker of “Diving into the Wreck” doesn’t adopt an explicitly feminist perspective. Even so, we can interpret their journey to examine a wreck as an allegory invested with similar liberatory politics.

Narratives of Descent

As indicated by the title, “Diving into the Wreck” is framed as a descent narrative. In Western literature, descent narratives are often modeled on a cosmic hierarchy that stems from Greco-Roman culture and, later, from Christian theology. According to this hierarchy, humans live on earth, and somewhere beneath the earth there exists a world where humans go when they die. For the Greeks and Romans, this world was known as the underworld, which is where everyone goes at the time of their death. For the Christians, this underworld became associated with Hell, an infernal region of torment reserved for the souls of the damned. Both the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions have produced key narratives where humans from the living world descend into the world below. The protagonists of Homer’s The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid both descend into the underworld. Likewise, Dante Alighieri depicts his own fictional descent into Hell in Inferno. In each of these different cases, the descent is a harrowing journey that reveals important moral or theological truths about the nature of existence. Likewise, the speaker of Rich’s poem makes a journey into a submerged realm in search of an important and forgotten truth.