Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defining Early Modern Girlhood
- 2 Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities
- 3 Female Infants and the Engendering of Humanity
- 4 Where Are the Girls in English Renaissance Drama?
- 5 Voicing Girlhood: Women's Life Writing and Narratives of Childhood
- Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defining Early Modern Girlhood
- 2 Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities
- 3 Female Infants and the Engendering of Humanity
- 4 Where Are the Girls in English Renaissance Drama?
- 5 Voicing Girlhood: Women's Life Writing and Narratives of Childhood
- Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Dreamwood’
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child's older self,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert,
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole, If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn't revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, massproduced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
massproduced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.
Adrienne Rich, from Time's Power (1989)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Girlhood of Shakespeare's SistersGender, Transgression, Adolescence, pp. 202 - 203Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013