Aunt Jenny S Tiger

Adrienne Rich is an American poet (1929) who grew up in with a Jewish father and a Protestant mother. As a result of this mixed marriage she was used to tensions between her parents. While Rich was growing up, she had to put up with moments of tense silence in her household. Rich felt dominated by her father’s strong personality while growing up. When Rich was growing up, women were expected to become dutiful wives in their adult lives.
All these elements may have influenced the picture of marriage Rich drew in this poem. At the heart of the poem is an image of a husband who controls and frightens his wife. The mood is of oppression and fear.
Rich wrote a lot of poems based on everyday experience. One topic she often featured was the tension women felt due to being dominated by their husbands.
In ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ Rich mocks the weakness of Aunt Jennifer and reveals the clout and authority of Jennifer’s husband. Rich probably wants to suggest how people could use a hobby like artwork to create a happier and prettier world than their daily life.
Rich has been one of America’s most important female poets for the past fifty years.
Summary and Critical Appreciation: Aunt Jennifer reveals her dreams of a happier life in her needlework. From the title it seems as if the narrator is a child. In the first stanza the narrator tells us that Aunt Jennifer makes a panel with images of tigers parading proudly across it. The tigers are free, unlike their maker. Her panel contains animals that are happier and more confident than she is. There is a ‘certainty’ about them that their maker lacks in her. On the panel Aunt Jennifer paints confident, proud tigers. They are assured and confident dwellers, ‘denizens’, of their green world. ‘Denizen’ suggests independent citizen. The image of the tigers is contrasted with the image of Aunt Jennifer, as Jennifer is not an independent person of her own world. She is instead a wife, weighed down by duties as we learn in the second stanza.
Her picture contains an image of men under a tree, though the proud tigers show no fear of the men. This is mentioned to show that they differ from Jennifer, who lives in fear of her husband constantly.
In the second stanza, the poet describes Aunt Jennifer’s nervous hands struggling to pull the wool with her ivory needle. The word ‘fluttering’ suggests trembling. We get the impression of a frail woman who finds it hard to pull the needle. The poet suggests that Aunt Jennifer’s fingers find it hard to hold the weight of her wedding ring and then pull the needle at the same time. By mentioning that it is ‘Uncle’s wedding band’, the poet suggests that Uncle owns Jennifer like the gold ring and that as a female she is also the property of her husband. The words ‘massive’ and ‘heavily’ suggest Aunt Jennifer lives a demanding sort of life in which she has to attend to her husband’s needs and fulfills his commands. As a result she is somewhat worn out in her old age.
In the third stanza, the poet predicts that, when Aunt Jennifer will die, her hands will look worn from all her needlework as well as the hard time she has trying to please her husband. Aunt Jennifer is ‘ringed’, trapped in her marriage and controlled like an animal. Her husband is her master. But her artwork will live on after her as a reminder of the dreams she could never fulfill.
Uncle’s wedding band’ ‘sits heavily’ on her hand because he dominates her life. Her life with her husband is described as a life of ‘ordeals’. It is shown that Jennifer is terrified in her marriage. Her husband may be fiercer to her than the tigers she produces in her artwork. The poem therefore provides a negative picture of marriage. The poem is probably saying that the ‘Uncle’ or husband is behaving like a tiger, and the tigers are ‘chivalric’ like the husband should be. Each world is the reverse of what it should be.
The poet suggests that the world of art is happier than the real world. She presents the theme of Dream versus Reality. One can only find happiness in the world of art whereas life is full of sorrows.
Aunt Jennifer’s hobby is making designs and pictures from wool. Jennifer produces wool tapestries that she places on panels. The creatures she places there are free and proud, the opposite to herself. She is ‘ringed’ or mastered in marriage and therefore she is not free, but controlled. It seems that she creates a happier looking world than the one she lives in. Jennifer uses sharp and contrasting colours, sharp yellow against a green background.
Her tigers are as bright as topaz .These bright contrasting colours are probably much more vivid than Jennifer’s everyday world. Her artistic work will live on after she dies, as, according to the poet, her tigers will ‘go on prancing’. The figures she creates are stronger and happier than she is. They are proud and ‘prance’ about, unlike their creator, who is nervous and fears her husband. The word ‘prance’ or parade contrasts sharply with ‘fluttering’, meaning trembling. The tigers do not fear the men the aunt places under some trees in her tapestry. Therefore, the imaginary tigers produced by Aunt Jennifer live a type of proud and free life that she can only dream about. It is a ‘chivalric’ world, one where gentlemen treat women with great respect. Perhaps Aunt Jennifer uses art as an escape from her troubles. In her artwork Jennifer imagines the kind of life she would have liked.
The poem contains three stanzas of four lines each. The language used is simple. Most of the words are short and simple everyday words .The main images are of Aunt Jennifer as a fearful wife and, secondly, the magnificent tigers she creates in her panel. Images of bright colours run through the poem: ‘topaz’, ‘ivory’ and the gold of ‘wedding band’. The poetic devices that she uses are metaphor (The poet compares the yellow stripes of the tigers to a precious stone, topaz), alliteration (prancing proud,) and assonance (find, ivory, screen-green)).