Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1951

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’’ comprises part of Rich’s first collection, published when she was still a college undergraduate. While the poem is sharp, poignant to her poetic goals, and expertly crafted, Rich’s poetic influences shape the poem more than her mastery. The poem shows more influence of mid-century American academia than her radical works in the proceeding decades. Rich admitted after the publication of her second book that her early work felt formulaic to her compared to her ease and confidence with later volumes. Still, the vibrant language and ideas expressed about womanhood and marriage make “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’’ a vivid point of departure and thesis for Rich’s early poetic work. The poem aligns with her burgeoning identity as a feminist, which continued to grow through her writing and personal life.

Rich found a decisive poetic movement later in her career in the 1960s and 70s. Her poetry is primarily associated with the radical feminist movement, which aimed to expand rights for women and question the predominating patriarchal structure and narrative of American society and culture. By writing about women’s experiences and the female body, and critiquing discrimination against women, Rich used her position as a prominent poet to advocate for women’s liberation. After she came out as a lesbian, she expanded this mission to include advocating for gay rights.

Cultural Context

In 1951, the year of the poem’s publication, American women certainly had fewer opportunities and rights than today. Postwar American culture was conservative and paranoid about communism. Any sexual orientation apart from heterosexuality was especially censured during the 1950s; there was a fear that gay people’s sexual orientation made them vulnerable to blackmail from the communist party, and there was a moral panic nationwide that paralleled the Red Scare in Hollywood; this moral panic is known as the Lavender Scare, and many lesbian and gay people faced persecution that has received relatively little attention from historians. Until 1962, all 50 states criminalized being gay, and the American Psychological Association considered it a mental illness until 1972.

Rich came of age in a culture that expected her to go to college to find a husband, have children, and tend to her nuclear family’s household; meanwhile, the legal and mental health systems told her that her sexuality was a crime and an illness. As a woman raised by her parents to be excellent and a prodigy, Rich bristled under a society that failed to match her expectations about womanhood. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is a direct rebellion against the confining expectations of the America that Rich grew up in, and—controversially—it portrays marriage not as the end goal for women but as a type of confinement. Though Rich does not hint at her sexuality in the poem (she did not come out until the middle of her career), the poem expresses reservations about heteronormativity, and her later work expands on this reservation.