Breaking Out
-Marge Piercy
Important
points to note-
-
Its important to capture the feeling of the poet in the long answer .
-
The Quotes (in Blue) should be learnt by heart.
-
Will cover five and a half sides of ISC booklet and can be finished in 30-35 mins.
- This is self sufficient to answer all type of questions . Depending on the question asked in exam , put emphasis on that part.
Marge Piercy is an American
novelist and social activist. She was born on March 31, 1936 in
Detroit, Michigan and did her graduation from University of Michigan.
Some of her most sought out titles are ‘Storm Tide’, ‘Fly Away
Home’, ‘Going Down Fast’ and many more. Her novels focus on
making radical social changes while poems on political awareness.
‘Breaking Out’ was first
published in the ‘Harbor Review in 1984. It potrays the double
oppression on a girl child for being a girl, and a child at the same
time. It also conveys to the readers her desperation to break free
from the social constraints that normally restrict a woman.
The first stanza of the poem
begins with a girl child’s assertion at breaking away from the
conventional norms of a patriarchal society wherein a woman is
treated as an inferior being and is subjected to a number of
discriminations. As suggested by the line,
‘My first
political act?’
The speaker in the poem, a
girl child, asks the readers if they want her to tell them about her
first political act, which she reveals in the later part of the poem.
The speaker sees her mother
doing endless domestic chores as a routine affair. It is through her
mother’s plight and her own that she is suggesting the role of
women in society and their miserable condition. Rather than being
thanked and respected for taking all the burden of household chores
on their shoulders, women are tortured, physically abused and
ill-treated. The narrator sees her mother doing expensing domestic
work like washing, ironing, cleaning and mopping the floor on a
perpetual basis.
‘A mangle stood
there, for ironing
what i never
thought needed it:
sheets, towels,
my father’s underwear;’
The speaker says that she
remembers the roaring, turbulent sound made by the vacuum cleaner
when its bag is deflated. It shows as if it were tired of dust
suction at home as she is.
‘an upright
vacuum with its stuffed
sausage bag that
deflated with a gusty
sigh as if weary
of housework as I ...’
The above lines indicate how
taxing it must have been for a little girl to perform such chores.
She must be feeling tired and sighing with pain, similar to the
signing sound made by the vacuum cleaner when its bag is deflated.
This leads to the growth of a kind of hatred against such domestic
chores, which she swears she would never do when she grows up.
‘….who swore
i would never dust or sweep
after i left
home, who hated
to see my mother
removing daily
the sludge the
air lay down like a snail’s track ‘
It is suggestive of sowing of
seeds of defiance in the speaker’s mind, which continue to grow
with each incident of oppression she is subjected to. That is why,
when in school she read about Sisyphus, her thoughts immediately go
to her mother. She compares the lot of her mother with Sisyphus. The
poem makes an allusion to Greek character Sisyphus, who was a cruel
king of Corinth. He was condemned to roll a boulder up the hill
forever because of the disrespect shown by him to Zeus. Like
Sisyphus, her mother has to broom everyday only to see her house get
dirty again by the ash and filth emitted by the factories.
‘so that when
in school i read of Sisyphus
and his rock, it
was her I
thought of,
housewife scrubbing
on raw knees as
the factory rained ash.’
The speaker here tries to
raise her voice for her mother and womankind in general who have to
clean dust deposited in their houses regardless of its effect on
their health. The women are subjected to a number of such tortures
which bring out their plight and agony.
The speaker then looks at a
wooden yardstick, which seems to her as an offspring of the rickety
doors because just like these doors were a source of her oppression
by confining her within the four walls of her house (symbolic of
conventional norms of a biased society which puts several restriction
on a women) similarly the yardstick was also a source of her
oppression as it was the brutal enforcer of her parent’s will.
‘...that stick
was the tool of punishment,
I was beaten as I
bellowed like a locomotive
as if noise could
ward off blows.’
After she is caned, she
inspects her lashes in the mirror. These lashes appear to her as blue
and red ridges in some mountain range, as seen on a map. It seems she
is looking for an escape route hiding in the map formed by the
lashes, a route to freedom. This built up anger & frustration,
because of the physical and mental pain inflicted on her, leads her
to break the instrument of her oppression, the yardstick.
‘When I was
eleven, after a beating
I took the ruler
and smashed it to kindling.
Fingering the
splinters I could not believe.
How could this
rod prove weaker than me?’
It
is this political act she referred to earlier, an act suggesting she
had crossed the threshold of childhood and she has become an
adolescent.
‘...but in
destroying that stick that had measured my pain
the next day i
was an adolescent, not a child.’
This
act symbolises her inner strength that enabled her to rebel and defy
her parents. She no longer considered the shackles of conventional
norms of a biased society so powerful that they could not be broken.
It seems that years of oppression on her from her early childhood and
her yearning for freedom had given her the power to ‘break
out’ of the
suffocating norms of the biased society and prevented her from being
another ‘Sisyphus’
like her mother.
‘This is not a
tale of innocence lost but power
gained : I would
not be Sisyphus,
there were things
that I should learn to break.’
Marge
has used a narrative style of poetry to share her experiences and
very skilfully she has used free verse which gives her freedom to say
what she wants to say without interruption. Not having a detailed
rhyming scheme has helped her put emphasis on the freedom to which
women are equally entitled. She uses plenty of figures of speech to
convey her feelings like use of simile in ‘...like a snail’s
track’ to indicate the slow and continuous deposition of dirt. She
personifies vacuum cleaner which ‘deflated with a gusty sigh’ to
indicate her wretched condition after doing all the work.
