\u201cEvery peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, making them eternally and visibly female. No height without depth, without a burning core\u201d (Rich, 148).<\/p>\n
When reading this particular excerpt of section XI of Twenty-One Love Poems <\/em>I immediately notice the gender attachment that Adrienne Rich gives to the volcano.\u00a0 The law of volcanoes is when power is forcefully held in, and then bursts. A volcano is extremely powerful and by identifying the \u201claw of volcanoes\u201d as a woman, it creates the parallelism of the harnessing and withholding of power, and the eruption of power as similar to the power of woman.\u00a0 It also relates to the suffering of woman, which is a common theme throughout Twenty-One Love Poems. <\/em>Rich commonly discusses woman finding their power through many different aspects, such as love or language, and that woman are forced by society to withhold their power.\u00a0 However, once one is able to harness the power which they hold in their \u201cburning core\u201d, they allow it to erupt and therefore become more powerful.\u00a0 Another place we see this idea is in Audre Lorde\u2019s piece, The Uses of the Erotic. <\/em>In Lorde\u2019s writing she discusses the idea of redefining the word erotic to mean power or using erotic as a resource for power.\u00a0 Once one is able to understand where that comes from, they can use it to their ability and become more powerful and self aware. \u00a0\u00a0For Rich it is the comparison between the volcano and a woman that exemplifies this, and for Lorde it is when she writes \u201cthe erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling,\u201d (Lorde 87).\u00a0 In both pieces, the usage of power is thought of as an entirely female force which is kept inside, until it is recognized, and once one can fully understand it, then it is an extremely powerful force.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cEvery peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, making them eternally and visibly female. No height without depth, without a burning core\u201d (Rich, 148). When reading this particular excerpt of section XI of Twenty-One Love Poems I immediately notice the gender attachment that Adrienne Rich gives to the volcano.\u00a0 The law of … Continue reading The Law of Volcanoes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}