Tracing the Androgyny Image as a Self-Distancing Strategy in Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck

The phallocentric structure of language privileges the male's discourse throughout history which allows no place for feminine discourse. In order to oppose the Lacanian concept of phallocentric discourse, feminist writers including Adrienne Rich resort to Cixous' term of "écriture feminine" to inscribe female difference in language. Rich as a powerful feminist voice in the last decades of the twentieth century, and in order to empower woman's status, abandons the male discourse and calls female writers to create their own discourse through re-writing female myths and stories. Therefore, Rich rejects the patriarchal heterosexual world which helps to create the binary opposition between sexes. The core objective of Cixous' theory "écriture féminine" is to deconstruct the man/ woman binary opposition through bisexuality. Hence, the present study aims to analyze the use of androgyny image in Rich's poem Diving into the Wreck as a distancing strategy to challenge the heterosexual male's institution, and to deconstruct the male's phallocentric language in light of Helene Cixous's theory of "écriture feminine". The study concludes that Rich creates the androgyny image as a self-distancing strategy in Diving into the Wreck as a way of returning to the place where there is no sexual difference between man and woman, to the maternal world,and to the source of the feminine power where there is no exclusion for the Other.