Why People Long for the College Years and Other Mysteries

Born in 1929, Adrienne Rich saw the world undergo numerous changes, wars, and social progression. Her poetry feels ordered and yet still vibrant. In her poem, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law,” Rich confronts the expectations, the monotony, and the dreams of the post World War II housewife.
“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot
and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes innacurately dream
Behind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we might have been,
All that we were—fire, tears, wit, taste, martyred ambition—
Stirs like the memory of refused adultery
The drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.
I love these lines, because I feel they operate on a number of levels. The post World War II generation had lost many lives and thus many dreams. Wives whose husbands did not come back home no doubt wondered what might have been had husbands not gone to war. In the loss of men of the younger generation, America and every country involved in war lost wit and ambition and shed tears. But Rich also writes as a woman and as a wife in the 1950s. Diderot’s quote is particularly poignant for women who grow up to be wives—women who no doubt had ambitions that were crushed either by their own restraint or by others. Rich expresses the longing, the wondering of what they could have been and the loss of the potential of what they were. Ambition became the martyr for the continuance of the society, and Rich seems to feel that martyrdom particularly on the part of women. At this point in the nation’s history, loyalty to an occupation or the pursuit of a dream that took a woman’s time away from the house might have look somewhat like adultery, a leaving of the first love to chase after something else. On a final level, Rich refers to the flagging bosom of the middle years. Middle age often seems to carry with it a sense of evaluation of what has past. Introspection and reflection seem hallmarks of the middle age where one realizes half of life is gone. And, of course, that half of life is still left to live.

Rich also comments on the nature of women’s literature. This stanza from the same poem reminds me of Fanny Fern, who satirically called out some of the comments by men against women’s literature. Their basic premise seems to be the same: “Judge literature critically, please, but do not judge our book with less intelligence of your part just because we are women.” Certainly women’s literature and thought had come a long way since the mid 1800s when Fanny was writing, but some prejudice or bias obviously still existed.
Time is male and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear our mediocrities over-praised,
Indolence read as abnegation, slattern thought styled intuition,
Every lapse forgiven, our crime only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.
It is not that Rich wants to be treated as a man or seen as a man. In one of her later poems, “Transcendental Etudes,” she speaks of the “homesickness for a woman, for ourselves” that embraces the particular nature of a woman. She wants to be taken just as seriously as a man. This homesickness that Rich speaks of seems to echo through some of the other contemporary poets’ works as well. The modern generation began to feel this disembodiment from the home, a sense of alienation from any place to be rooted. Many of the authors traveled to Europe and made new homes. As postmodernism continued to develop out of modernism, poets and authors still seem to be searching for a sense of home and place, all the while understanding that one must cut “away…of an old force that held her rooted to an old ground.” There is an almost existential loneliness in searching for oneself, echoed in Rich, in “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, in Cathy Song’s “The White Porch. As we become increasingly more individualistic, we become more and more isolated. In our eagerness to declare our own independence, I think we often overlook the power of finding oneself in the midst of a community. Before I came to college, I often heard “These are the best years of your life.” Whether that is true or not, I think there is power in the myth because of the community a college creates. At a pivotal point in one’s self development, at a crossroads of “finding oneself,” the collegiate system puts together seeking individuals who live together, think together, eat together. We share in the journey together, whether with professors or classmates or friends as we simply live life alongside one another. That sense of exploration within a usually supportive community is I believe what makes people nostalgic for the college years.

I appreciate the outright raw humor in Sherman Alexie’s “Do Not Go Gentle.” Certainly if any of these works represented a movement toward a freedom to discuss every day matters candidly, it was this work. I found myself laughing out loud at this celebration of humor and life in the midst of the possibility of death, even the death of a young child. Alexie is not trying to impress with noble sentiments but to capture the really real of a parent’s emotion. “I know I would have earthquaked Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome, and killed a million innocent people, if it guaranteed my baby boy would rise back to his full life,” the father remarks with complete, raw honesty. There is nothing esoterically intellectual about his statement like the modernists, and there is no restraint in his thought as with the mid century authors. Rawness defines this work and perhaps the next generation of poets.