Whatever happens to “you,” the injustice, the subjugation, effects the reader on a more personal level thus, the reader tends to pay more attention to declarative sentences and tends to feel more demand from imperative sentences. Once line two introduces the possessive pronoun “your,” all that follows put the reader directly into story. Rich presents the entire story in an experiential way and uses second person point of view to augment the potency behind these demonstrations of power. His will, the will of the patriarchy, is served by the female in the end. Truly, Rich argues, the rape victim should be the focus and her will should be justly served, yet, once again, the male figure denies her that right. Syntactically, “you” should be the sentence’s focus. “You have to confess” (Rich, line 13) may be the core of the sentence, but because it lies buried at line thirteen’s end and because of the enjambment, line thirteen has a less definitive tone. Even though “to him” is a mere adverbial prepositional phrase, its physical placement at the front of a line, gives it power. In this way, Rich employs syntactic hierarchy to express the reality of the situation. Even line seven’s syntax alone explains that “you,” the rape survivor, exists in a state of the complete and total mercy to “he,” a police officer, the man. In line seven, the clause “that could kill you” is the humble servant to “machinery.” This along with the fact that “machinery” functions as nothing more than a lowly object of the preposition, forces “you,” the inferior noun in the dependent clause, to the bottom of the totem pole. Adjectival dependent clauses act in service to the noun or pronoun they describe. The line, “he has access to machinery that could kill you,” (Rich, line 7) places “he” as the subject of the independent clause, “you” as the direct object of the adjectival dependent clause, describing “machinery.” Sovereignty belongs to the subject noun in any clause, but supreme power belongs to the subject that reigns over the independent clause. Through breaks in repetition and opposing descriptions, Rich conveys an image of hierarchy that displays the disturbing reality that the victims of rape are themselves treated as criminals. Even the woman in Rich’s poem knew that because of the policeman’s pre-judgments, she would be found “guilty of the crime / of having been forced” (Rich, lines 14-5). This story takes place in the early 1970’s, in an era when men scoffed at women who claimed they were raped and would often accuse them of adultery. In “Rape,” one of the key poems in this collection, Rich tells the story of a woman recounting the details of her recent rape to a policeman. One of the most influential books published during the Second Wave was Adrienne Rich’s collection of poetry Diving into the Wreck. ![]() Please Note: The Telegram Channels and are fake.Image of Adrienne RIch from the New Yorker Risch has an h-index of 102 and is a Member of the Connecticut Academy of Sciences and Engineering. Risch is an author of more than 400 original peer-reviewed research publications in the medical literature and those research papers have been cited by other scientific publications more than 46,000 times. Risch is Associate Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Editor of the International Journal of Cancer, and for six years was a Member of the Board of Editors, the American Journal of Epidemiology. His major research projects have included studies of ovarian cancer, pancreas cancer, lung cancer, bladder cancer, esophageal and stomach cancer, and of cancers related to usage of oral contraceptives and noncontraceptive estrogens. He is especially interested in the effects of reproductive factors, diet, genetic predisposition, histopathologic factors, occupational/environmental/medication exposures, infection and immune functioning in cancer etiology. Risch's research interests are in the areas of cancer etiology, prevention and early diagnosis, and in epidemiologic methods. Risch was a faculty member in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Toronto before coming to Yale. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the University of Washington, Dr. Risch received his MD degree from the University of California San Diego and PhD, in mathematical modeling of infectious epidemics, from the University of Chicago. Harvey Risch is Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine.
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