‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-
2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World, which was
published while the precocious Rich was still in her early twenties.
The speaker describes her aunt’s embroidery featuring tigers who prance proudly and
unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.
Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Answer the questions
1.Describe the tigers created by Aunt Jennifer.
2.Why did Aunt Jennifer choose to embroider tigers on the panel?
3.What will happen to Aunt Jennifer’s tigers when she is dead?
4.How has Aunt Jennifer created her tigers? What traits of tigers do they reveal?
5.Why are Aunt Jennifer’s hands fluttering through her wool?
6.Describe the contrast between Aunt Jennifer ‘ and her creation, the tigers.
7.Why do you think Aunt Jennifer created animals that are so different from her own
character?
8.What do the symbols, ‘tigers’, ‘fingers’ and ‘ring’ stand for in the poem, ‘Aunt Jennifer’s
Tigers’?
9.Why did Aunt Jennifer choose to embroider tigers on the panel?
10.What kind of married life did Aunt Jennifer lead?
11. What will happen to Aunt Jennifer’s tigers when she
Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich
(1929-2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of
World, which was published while the precocious Rich was still in her early
twenties.
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Rich was
known for her feminist writings as well as her poetry, and this fact is
relevant for an analysis of ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’, in which the speaker
describes her aunt’s embroidery featuring tigers who prance proudly and
unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.
‘Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers’: summary
The poem
comprises three stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the tigers
her aunt has created in an embroidery. On the screen of fabric, the tigers
appear to ‘prance’ or move in a lively manner against the backdrop, which is
green. They are without fear.
The
embroidery also contains some men under a tree, but the tigers are apparently
unafraid of the men. They walk about the scene, glossy and smooth and sure of
themselves; they are majestic, like knights from the medieval days of chivalry.
In the
second stanza, the speaker describes the movement of her aunt’s finger as she
works on the woollen embroidery with an ivory needle. On the aunt’s finger is
her wedding ring, denoting her marriage to the speaker’s uncle. This wedding
ring is described as sitting heavily on the aunt’s hand, implying the
oppressive weight of marriage as a patriarchal system (of which more below).
The speaker
concludes the poem by thinking about the future. When her aunt dies, her hands
will lie in her grave and even in death they will bear the mark of all of the
suffering and hardship she endured when she was alive. However, the tigers she
has created in the embroidered panel will continue to prance proudly forever,
unafraid of anything.
‘Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers’: analysis
If we
wished to summarise the meaning of Adrienne Rich’s poem in one sentence, we
could do worse than offer: ‘“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is about a woman using art
to triumph over the oppression of patriarchy, which rules her life but cannot
rule the art she creates.’ The tigers Aunt Jennifer embroiders represent the
kind of creature she wishes she could be: proud and unafraid of the men in her
life.
In an early
collection of her essays, Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979),
Adrienne Rich observed that throughout history, ‘women’s struggle for
self-determination’ had been ‘muffled in silence’.
The
reference to history is apposite, because ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ may put us
in mind of all of those examples from nineteenth-century women’s fiction in
which female characters wove or painted their stories or desires because they
felt unable to speak them out loud. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
ground-breaking study of this, The
Madwoman in the Attic, contains many such examples, and came out in the same year as Rich’s
essay collection.
Aunt
Jennifer, then, weaves or embroiders an image of woman – symbolically rendered
into tigers in her artwork – which does not exist, but which is devoutly to be
wished. The tigers are proud, confident, and unafraid: unlike Aunt Jennifer
herself, and many other women, they do not go in fear of the men, beneath the
tree or elsewhere.
The tigers
are a symbol of power but also that ‘self-determination’ Rich identified as
women’s struggle throughout the ages. Their ‘topaz’ colours (some varieties of
the mineral topaz are indeed orange-brown, with some black) contrast sharply
with the green backdrop of the embroidery Aunt Jennifer is working on.
We do not
know the age of the poem’s speaker – the niece (if we assume she is female) of
‘Aunt Jennifer’. But there is something simple about the rhyming couplets of
the poem, with these couplets themselves being arranged into pairs to form
quatrains, and the (largely iambic) pentameter metre of the poem.
The poem’s
rhythms might even put us in mind of children’s nursery rhymes – ‘Humpty Dumpty’, perhaps – and this adds an extra angle to the
poem’s depiction of female subjugation.
How
innocent is the speaker of Rich’s poem? How old, or how young? The key to the
poem’s success as a feminist poem, perhaps, lies in the way Rich’s speaker
seems innocent of the import of the things she is revealing to us: for example,
the link between those men in the first stanza of the poem and the wedding band
weighing down Aunt Jennifer’s finger in the second.
The ivory
in Aunt Jennifer’s needle, meanwhile, is another reminder of the violent and
predatory nature of men, who will hunt and slaughter elephants for their ivory
tusks.
We are
left, then, to piece together these disparate details and form a picture of, on
the one hand, the quiet, meek, and put-upon Aunt Jennifer, and the proud,
fearless, and masterly bravura of the tigers she creates through her art.
There are
only subtle hints given about those ‘ordeals’ she suffered, ordeals her hands
became ‘ringed’ by: both defined and restricted
by, in other words. A key word in that final stanza is ‘mastered’, summoning
the masculine dominance over Aunt Jennifer’s life.
In the last analysis, then, ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a poem which
celebrates women’s ability to create art out of their oppression, but the
nature of Aunt Jennifer’s art is at the same time a reminder that she could not
speak out or forge a different path for herself: the (silent) world of those
tigers on their green screen, and the (safely feminine) practice of needlework
was the only outlet for her quiet defiance against marriage and other
patriarchal norms.
