GENDER AND DIFFERENCE IN THE POETRY OF ADRIENNE RICH

The paper is concerned with the way the poetry of Adrienne Rich effects an indirect reconciliation between the seemingly incompatible positions of the Anglo- American and French feminisms in respect to the issues of gender and difference. The poetic development of Adrienne Rich is presented as a movement from a male-oriented to woman-centred kind of writing and finally to a decentred vision that goes beyond gender and difference. By its power to rearouse forbidden desire Rich's poetry disrupts the system of linguistic and existential binary oppositions and to Freudian and Lacanian notions of subjectvity, constituted on absence, loss or separation, opposes the self in whom the body is made fully present to the mind, the memory of the lost mother recovered and being and thinking re-connected.