• Adrienne Rich is an American poet who was born in 1929.
• She was brought up in a well-off family.
• Adrienne was the elder of two daughters.
• Her father was a doctor and her mother was a music composer.
• She grew up in with a Jewish father and a Protestant mother. As a result of this mixed marriage she was used to tensions between her parents. While Rich was growing up, she had to put up with moments of tense silence in her household.
• Rich felt dominated by her father’s strong personality while growing up. It was he who most guided her as a young poet. This wasn’t always to her liking as he expected her to write her poems his way.
• When Rich was growing up men dominated and women were expected to become dutiful wives in their adult lives.
• All these elements may have influenced the picture of marriage Rich drew in this poem. At the heart of the poem is an image of a husband who controls and frightens his wife.
• Rich wrote a lot of poems based on everyday experience. One topic she often featured was the tension women felt due to being dominated by their husbands.
• In ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ Rich is mocking the weakness of Aunt Jennifer and the clout and authority of Jennifer’s husband in their marriage.
• Rich was also fascinated by how people could use a hobby like artwork to create a happier and prettier world than their daily life.
• Rich has been one of America’s most important female poets for the past fifty years.
Summary
• This poem of three four-line stanzas imagines a relative whose hobby is needlework.
• Aunt Jennifer reveals her dreams of a happier life in her needlework.
• From the titles given to the adults, it seems as if the speaker is a child.
• In the first stanza the relative, Aunt Jennifer, makes a panel with images of tigers parading proudly across it. The tigers are free, unlike their maker.
• Her panel contains animals that are happier and more confident than she is. There is a ‘certainty’ about them that their maker lacks in herself.
• Aunt Jennifer paints confident, proud tigers. They are assured and confident dwelllers, ‘denizens’, of their green world. ‘Denizen’ suggests independent citizen.
• It would seem that Jennifer is not an independent citizen of her own world. She is instead a wife, weighed down by duties as we learn in the second stanza.
• Jennifer uses sharp and contrasting colours, sharp yellow against a green background.
• Her tigers are as bright as topaz, a yellow gem.
• Her picture contains an image of men under a tree, though the proud tigers show no fear of the men. This is mentioned to show that they differ from Jennifer, who lives in fear of her husband to some extent.
• The tigers remind the poet of knights, full of courtesty and style. Chivalric men respected their women and acted kindly towards them. Again, this seems to contrast with how ‘Uncle’ behaved towards Aunt Jennifer according to the second stanza.
• In the second stanza, the poet describes Aunt Jennifer’s nervous hands struggling to pull the wool with her ivory needle. The word ‘fluttering’ suggests trembling.
• We get the impression of a frail woman who finds it hard to pull the needle.
• It is interesting that if her needle is made of ivory it may have come from an elephant’s tusk. Ivory is a bit like topaz, a precious material. As ivory involves the killing of elephants for their valuable tusks, it would seem that Jennifer may not care much for tigers in the wild or know much about their reality.
• Thus, her artwork is unrealistic. Perhaps the poet feels it is a pointless and empty type of art.
• The poet humorously suggests that Aunt Jennfer’s fingers find it hard to hold the weight of her wedding ring and then pull the needle at the same time.
• The wedding band is another reference to a precious substance, probably gold.
• By mentioning that it is ‘Uncle’s wedding band’, the poet suggests that Uncle owns Jennifer too and that as a female she is the property of her husband.
• The words ‘massive’ and ‘heavily’ suggest Aunt Jennifer lives a demanding sort of life in which she has to attend to her husband’s needs and fulfil his commands. As a result she is somewhat worn out in her old age.
• In the third stanza, the poet predicts that, when Aunt Jennifer dies, her hands will look worn from all her needlework as well as the hard time she has trying to please her husband.
• Aunt Jennifer is ‘ringed’, trapped in her marriage and controlled like an animal. Her husband is her master.
• Her artwork will live on after her as a reminder of the dreams she never fulfilled.
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